Research
Recently Published & Forthcoming
“ ‘something understood’: Spiritual Experience and George Herbert’s Sonnets” Religions, 16.4, (2025): 434. http://doi.org/10.3390/rel16040434
Drawing from The Temple, a seventeenth-century volume of devotional poems written by George Herbert, this essay sets out to unfold how deliberately choosing constraint can lead to a spiritual experience. Beginning with a formal analysis of Herbert’s shape poem “The Altar” to demonstrate how form and content simultaneously create meaning in lyric poetry, the remainder of the essay focuses on Herbert’s most formally constrained poems: the sonnets. Using Herbert’s treatment of the sonnet form as evidence of deliberately choosing constraint, Herbert’s poetics transform our conceptual understanding of the elements that make up a Christian religious experience. Titled by the same words that provide the foundation for Christian spiritual experience, the sonnets “Prayer”, “Love”, and “Redemption”, among others, renew our understanding of religious experience by refocusing our attention via the constraints of the poetic form. By pairing together key religious concepts with the constrained attentive demands of poetry, Herbert’s sonnets challenge notions of passivity and call instead for a renewed understanding of the Christian experience. Characterized by the need for careful attention and neurological intensification—a specific quality of religious experience—Herbert’s sonnets become rooms, or perhaps, poetic chapels, where readers have the chance to experience the spiritual ultimacy of “something understood.”
This essay explores the relationship between hermeneutics and poetics, offering “a theological framework anchored in the materiality of Christ” that challenges the privileging of content over form. Within this framework the poetics of the incarnation elevates literary forms as an essential and worthwhile point of literary investigation. This description, also sharing theological connections to the Incarnation, implies a type of reading that affords form and content to manifest simultaneously and distinctly. Within a hypostatic union, content and form equally inform and/or reform each other, sometimes supporting, challenging, upholding, or even thwarting the sentiment of the other. Rather than mining devotional poetry for theological resources to be refined and repackaged according to the current confessional market, I ague that a Christian poetics embodies an approach that attends to the ethical treatment of both form and content. This ethical treatment takes the form of serious considerations of the poem’s content as well as the local and global structures, patterns, and shapes that organize each poem, refusing to disregard the sonic, rhythmic, and spatial elements that make up the material form of a poem. The methodological stakes of this adjustment ripple to affect the way we view and care for the objects of our literary inquiries, the students in our classrooms, and the resources in our material world.
“ ‘That which purifies’: Christian Poetics in Renaissance Studies” Among Winter Cranes, the quarterly publicationof the Christian Poetics Initiative affiliated with the Rivendell Center for Theology and the Arts, ed. by David Mahan 6.3, (Summer 2023): 1-9.
This essay steps into the space between the assertion in Milton’s eighth line, “For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime” and Milton’s one-hundred, sixty-sixth line, “For Lycidas […] is not dead” to elucidate how Milton’s poem transforms itself from overwhelming grief to Christian contentment. In minding the gap between death and resurrection, I argue that Milton’s Lycidas is invested in navigating loss, specifically unjust loss. To demonstrate the depths of Milton’s poetic investment in loss, this essay begins by situating Lycidas within the poem’s 1638 publication. Once situated within the 1638 volume, the argument then considers the implications of Milton’s pastoral landscape. By combining the shipwreck occasion of King’s death with the shepherds of the pastoral, this essay demonstrates through a pilot-Christ reading how Milton approaches injustice through two distinct systems of understanding and how the poem establishes a bridge between the two “Through the dear might of him what walked the waves”. Milton’s continued investment in Christ’s identity through his lifetime demonstrates a heightened interest in soteriology.Aligned with scholarship that looks towards Milton’s earlier works to illuminate the development of his later masterpieces, the redemptive power of Christ’s identity—as demonstrated in Lycidas— surfaces again in Satan’s resolve to discover “who this is” in Paradise Regained (PR 1. 91). Within the framework of Milton’s work, Christ’s identity is intrinsically connected to what Christ can accomplish. As a whole, Lycidas’s investments in death, shepherds, and poetry tell a story much greater than a single commemorative poem can accomplish, and Milton spends the rest of his career as a poet working out the finer details of what it means to be “sunk low but mounted high.”
“ ‘Sunk low, but mounted high’: The Conventions of Christ in Milton’s Lycidas” forthcoming in Diverse Miltons: Papers from the 2022 Conference on John Milton, ed. by David Ainsworth and Marissa Greenberg, Clemson University Press (apx. 8,500 words).
In Progress & Under Review
“Incarnational Poetics: Poetry, Devotion, and Materiality in Early Modern England” (Dissertation, apx. 65,000 words)
“Reverend Black: Edward Herbert’s Poetics of Blackness” (Article, apx. 9,000 words)