Creation in Cavendish, Du Bartas, Hutchinson, Denham, and Marvell
from Part II - Imagined Worlds
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 October 2023
This chapter considers seventeenth-century poetic works that take various positions, implicitly or explicitly, on the question of the relationship between human and divine creation: Margaret Cavendish’s prose fiction Blazing World, biblical creation epics by Guillaume Du Bartas and Lucy Hutchinson, and topographical poems by Sir John Denham and Andrew Marvell. Cavendish and Marvell suggest that it is prideful and misleading to assume that humans can discover truth about divine creation by natural means; Du Bartas and Denham, by contrast, tend to collapse the distance between humans and God, frequently casting God as an “architect” or other type of human creator. Situated between these two groups is Hutchinson, who believes humans can gain insights into God’s ways by looking at our own—but these insights are only ever shadowy and partial and frequently need to be supplemented by divine revelation.
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