In Coming To, Timothy M. Harrison establishes the fundamental importance of poetic creation to the nascent early modern concept of consciousness. The seventeenth century saw the Latin word conscientia shed many of its evaluative, moral associations and come instead to signal “mental presence—the fact that self and world show up” (2). For Harrison, this transformation intersects with—indeed relies on—contemporary interest in “the moment when an individual human being's thought first flared into existence” (1), a moment that occupies peculiar prominence in the poetry of the period. In the seventeenth century, Harrison argues, poetry was widely understood as a mode of fiction making that is nonetheless not self-identical with fiction, and whose distinctive nature resides in two related qualities: most crucially, for this book, “poetry's mimetic dedication to particular beings, lives, thoughts, and speech acts”; and secondarily, “poetry's role as a vehicle for praise and blame” (19–20). It is poetry's...
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