ABSTRACT
An Collins’s volume of poems, Divine Songs and Meditacions (1653), is a spiritual autobiography containing lyrical analyses of affliction and recovery, theological commentary, complex self-representation, self-expression, and self-defense, praise of God, thoughtful meditations on daily experiences, and reflections on social/communal life and public events.1 What I examine in this essay is the extent to which writing is a key reference point for these topics, a recurrent touchstone that is both a concrete and literal motif in itself, and a far-reaching multivalent and synecdochic figure. This is not, of course, entirely surprising or unprecedented. An integral part of the tradition of early to mid-seventeenth-century religious poetry is the conflation of problems of devotion and problems of writing devotional verse. But even with these precedents in mind, Divine Songs and Meditacions is remarkable for how the major and interrelated events of Collins’s personal, social and political, and devotional life find significant and compelling form in her representations of the drama of writing.
