What if poetry invented consciousness? While I hyperbolize, this is the ultimate claim of Timothy M. Harrison’s Coming To. Joining a growing wave of scientifically minded studies of Renaissance literature, Harrison finds real conceptual work in literature. As the shadow of STEM looms over the humanities, Harrison’s book is a timely reminder that literary scholarship can historically analyze scientific concepts without sacrificing its distinctive concerns for value and form. In fact, he shows the mimetic, particularizing character of literature to be a prerequisite for consciousness to emerge at all. One can thus read Harrison’s study methodologically, as intellectual history, or as close reading of two important poets. Most will come to Coming To for John Milton but should stay for Thomas Traherne.
Coming To argues that “the birth of consciousness as a concept was intimately and paradoxically grounded in the consciousness of birth” (250). Harrison sketches a semantic drift...
