In 1991, I argued that, “The Puritan patrimony has exacted a heavy toll on men, a fact borne out by our present ‘crisis in masculinity,’” which second wave feminists identified as the existence of “a rape culture” in the United States. A contributing factor was the narrative of religious conversion innovated by early New England Puritanism, which required believers to become spiritual “brides of Christ” in order to be saved. This devotional rhetoric not only colored Puritan poetry but indicated deeply held attitudes about spirituality, embodied gender, and social power, which shaped subsequent US poetry. In this chapter, I revisit and update these claims in the light of trans theory, reread poetry on spiritual gender by Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor, early New England’s two major poets; and conclude with a discussion of Emily Dickinson, who was raised in a Puritan culture but makes irreverent, even subversive, use of this legacy.

This chapter explores a set of intracorpus echoes in Catullus that has gone largely unexamined, presumably because it unites three poems that appear to be so utterly mismatched as to seem that they cannot comment on one another. The author argues that a familiar comic routine featuring Roman comedy’s “clever slave” binds these three poems together and illustrates how Catullus engages in social competition with his peers and rivals among the Roman elite. This character provides Catullus a model for displaying what William Anderson has dubbed “Heroic Badness,” a distinctly Plautine virtue by which the underdogs of Roman comedy gain the upper hand over blocking figures who hinder them from achieving their goals, despite the fact that they suffer from social and situational impairments. This chapter argues that the Roman elite found value in identifying with Roman comedy’s servus callidus and explores implications this affinity has for Catullus’ depiction of himself and others in his poetry.