ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the faultlines in the poetic self-consciousness, tracing apparently Calvinist renunciations of verse alongside humanist affirmations in order to determine where, finally, authorization rests. In the early 1600's, when reform, renegotiation, translation and authorization were matters of national and spiritual consequence, the arrangement of words and ideas and the imagining of religious truth and experience were delicate, even volatile processes. In poetry, conflict arose between the sincerity or hart-depth of religious feeling and the potential insincerity of the rhetorical vehicle. If this conflict was the toy of the Elizabethan sonneteers, it became the thorn in the side of the religious lyricists. The religious poets find themselves caught in the midst of that transition: Their quest for the truth of feeling lies somewhere between the enlarged Protestant ego and the deflating scientific impulse, between the legitimate counterfeits of writing and the minute deliberations of reading.
