What is the relationship between our isolated and our social selves, between aloneness and interconnection? Poetic Relations probes this question through a suggestive literary tradition: early Protestant poems in which a single speaker describes a solitary search for God. Offering new readings of well-known poems from the English Reformation—including poems by John Donne, George Herbert, Anne Bradstreet, and others—the book reveals that sources seemingly concerned with solitary experiences of faith and doubt in fact provide sophisticated expressions of relational selfhood. To highlight the sig ... More

What is the relationship between our isolated and our social selves, between aloneness and interconnection? Poetic Relations probes this question through a suggestive literary tradition: early Protestant poems in which a single speaker describes a solitary search for God. Offering new readings of well-known poems from the English Reformation—including poems by John Donne, George Herbert, Anne Bradstreet, and others—the book reveals that sources seemingly concerned with solitary experiences of faith and doubt in fact provide sophisticated expressions of relational selfhood. To highlight the significance of devotional poetry's relational selfhood, the book compares it to modern theories of subjectivity and selfhood by Judith Butler and Hannah Arendt, in particular. Instead of being constituted by shared frailties (as Butler observes), or defined by individual narratives (as Arendt contends), these relational selves are poetic, which is to say they are defined less by a beginning and an end than by the process of framing fleeting moments, creating images, and inhabiting the multiplicity of metaphor. By means of an analysis equally attentive to theological ideas, social conventions, and poetic form, Poetic Relations reveals how poets who understand introspection as a relational act, and poetry itself as a form ideally suited to crafting a relational self, offer us new ways of thinking about selfhood today—and a resource for reimagining both secular and religious ways of being in the world.