Introduction

Abstract

Abstract Du Bartas’ poems are about how the world was made, and how we make sense of the world. In praising the creative powers of God, his works advocate a Protestant poetics that denigrates human creativity and urges poets to replicate the established truths found in Scripture and nature. Despite contemporary and later comparisons between Du Bartas’ poems and the Book of Nature, his poems were self-consciously imperfect and are better understood as ‘poems of commonplaces’ that organize knowledge around a set of authoritative scriptural headings. This reading of the poems’ biblical aesthetics, in line with recent francophone criticism, provides a basis for understanding how English and Scottish readers from varied backgrounds read and imitated the poems. This chapter also outlines the book’s structure.