The Poetics of Matter and Form: Mid-Seventeenth-Century Women's Poetry and Natural Philosophy

This thesis traces the reciprocal relationship between natural philosophy and poetry in mid-seventeenth-century women’s poetry. It argues that Anne Bradstreet (1612–1672), Lucy Hutchinson (1620–1681), Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673) and Hester Pulter (1605–1678) build their poetics from the ubiquitous yet strange interactions of matter and form that can be natural philosophical, poetic, rhetorical, logical, theological and political.

Chapter 1 focuses on Bradstreet’s debate poem “The Four Elements” (1650). It argues that the four elements’ seventeenth-century ontological precarity catalyses Bradstreet’s deconstruction of traditional elemental hierarchies, and the social, gendered and theological hierarchies that elemental philosophy upholds. Chapter 2 turns to Hutchinson’s translation of Lucretius’ "De rerum natura". It argues that Hutchinson draws a liberating theory of translation as transformation from the recombinatorial theory of atomic-poetic form embedded in Lucretius’ atom-letter analogy which she then turns back on the "De rerum natura’s" atomic doctrines. In particular, Hutchinson recombines the poem’s atomism to interrogate the potential role(s) form might have to play in atomic physics and metaphysics, finding surprising continuities between atomic and hylomorphic understandings of form. Margaret Cavendish’s "Poems and Fancies" (1653) is the focus of chapter 3. It argues that her natural philosophical theory of fancy as the material, figurative motions of her mind, emerges in conversation with a seventeenth-century, royalist poetics that values free, easy and smooth couplets. By reemphasising the importance of motion to Cavendish’s natural philosophical theory of form (or figure), it suggests that fancy should be thought of as akin to rhythm, a material form that unfolds over time. The final chapter examines Hester Pulter’s breathy poetics, arguing that Pulter’s invocations of breath and sighs are informed by both scripture and a detailed understanding of seventeenth-century acoustics. Like many seventeenth-century theories of sound, Pulter makes matter do the unifying work of form.