Poetry

Abstract

This chapter studies the seventeenth-century poetry of illness, focusing on not just verse composed as a response to ill-health, but the ways in which poems offering devotional assistance to the sick were collected and circulated in manuscript. It examines the circulation of poems by Henry Wotton and Edward Lapworth, Gilbert Frevile’s commonplace book, poetry written into autobiographical texts by Alathea Bethell, Elizabeth Freke and Katherine Austen, original verse by Nicholas Billingsley, An Collins and Hester Pulter, and John Donne’s ‘Hymne to God, my God in my Sicknes’. The argument advanced is that dedicated poetry written about illness tended to favour practical, devotional responses offered as exemplars for future generations, rather than as expressions of introspective selfhood.