Writing for the Inner Eye

Abstract

Abstract Abraham Cowley reacted against the tradition of divine poetry that Du Bartas embodied, arguing that scriptural poets needed to have technical expertise and spiritual insight. As later seventeenth-century poets like Thomas Heywood, John Perrot, and Samuel Pordage became aware of the limits of simply describing literal truths from the Bible and natural world, they reverted to allegorical and other figurative narrative structures that could accommodate higher truths to the human imagination and describe psychological experience. John Milton had known Sylvester’s translation since he was a teenager, but Paradise Lost makes purposeful allusions that surpass Devine Weekes, showing how difficult it is to apprehend divine truth, and how interpretation depends on our point of view. Lucy Hutchinson’s meditations on Genesis revise Du Bartas’ poetics to strip away extraneous material that distracts from scriptural truth.