Poetic relations: intimacy and faith in the English Reformation

What is the relationship between our isolated and our social selves, between aloneness and interconnection?

Constance M. Furey probes this question through a suggestive literary tradition: early Protestant poems in which a single speaker describes a solitary search for God.

As Furey demonstrates, John Donne, George Herbert, Anne Bradstreet, and others describe inner lives that are surprisingly crowded, teeming with human as well as divine companions.

The same early modern writers who bequeathed to us the modern distinction between self and society reveal here a different way of thinking about selfhood altogether.

For them, she argues, the self is neither alone nor universally connected, but is forever interactive and dynamically constituted by specific relationships.