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Nature’s Poetry and Humanity’s Artifice: Cavendish on the Powers of the Imagination

Nature’s Poetry and Humanity’s Artifice: Cavendish on the Powers of the Imagination

Update: 2024-01-18

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Early modern philosophers in the Cartesian tradition often tended to oppose the workings of rational thought to the workings of the imagination. My aim in this paper is to show that Margaret Cavendish’s conception of the imagination poses an intriguing counterpoint to such views. Through an exploration of Cavendish’s Poems and Fancies (1653), I argue Cavendish posits her poetic depictions of nature as a counterpoint to a gendered rejection of the imagination, while at the same time laying the foundation for her critique of Baconian experimentalism.

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Nature’s Poetry and Humanity’s Artifice: Cavendish on the Powers of the Imagination

Nature’s Poetry and Humanity’s Artifice: Cavendish on the Powers of the Imagination

Cambridge University