Description:

Protestantism is often hailed or blamed for privatizing spirituality. The spiritual self, as we usually envision it, is a solitary soul. I argue, however, that Protestantism in fact inspired a poetics of relationality. This presentation’s comparative analysis of poetry by the seventeenth century English writer Aemilia Lanyer and her contemporary John Donne reveals, for example, spiritual selves that are neither singular nor defined by subjection to another (i.e. God) but constituted in dynamic and varied ways by interactions between the speaker, the reader, and others both human and divine. Deploying traditional Christian doctrines as sophisticated theories of relationality, I focus specifically on the trinitarian eroticism of Lanyer’s poems about Christ and the christological dialectic of John Donne’s love lyrics. Contrary to the usual emphasis on lack and loss, self-sacrifice or narcissistic self-projection, eroticism in these poems is all about relational selves.