Gordon Teskey
Humanities Scholarship
(Literature-Scholarship) – Francis Lee Higginson Professor of English Literature, Harvard University – Canada/United States
Gordon Teskey will work on his book The Metaphysics of the Metaphysicals. Poets of the Renaissance, including Amelia Lanyer, John Donne, Ben Jonson, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, and Lucy Hutchinson, invented new metaphysical grounds for figurative language, using society, the ego, transcendence, consciousness, and materialist science as foundations for their poems. This project takes seriously the term metaphysics as reflecting the quest for solid grounds for poetry-making, a quest that is still urgent today.