Hester Pulter's Psalmic Poems

Hatton, Nikolina (2022): Hester Pulter's Psalmic Poems. In: Renaissance Studies

Abstract

This essay examines the use of psalm structures, rhetoric, and poetics in the devotional poetry of Hester Pulter, a mid-seventeenth-century Royalist manuscript poet. Scholarship has shown the adaptability of the voice of the psalms, how it is amendable to both an 'I' and a 'we' simultaneously. Pulter takes advantage of this flexibility: although these poems generally express the spiritual woes and longings of a lone speaker, Pulter's use of recognizable psalm patterns and motifs situates her poetry within a broader community that engages with the psalms through corporate worship. Pulter thus melds her own distinctive (Royalist) poetic voice with a psalm framework recognizable to any protestant reader, whatever their political orientation. Writing psalmic poems gives Pulter not only a means of expressing her private devotions in an acceptable religious form, but it also allows her to invoke an audience for her poems, an audience that may in turn blend their own voices with the voice of this lone Royalist woman.

• Dokumententyp: Zeitschriftenartikel
• Fakultät: Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaften > Department 3
• Themengebiete: 400 Sprache > 400 Sprache
• ISSN: 0269-1213
• Sprache: Englisch
• DFG: Gefördert durch die Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - 491502892