The Poetics of Materialism in Cavendish and Milton

This article discusses the attempts of Margaret Cavendish and John Milton to create a poetics of materialism that could navigate between Philip Sidney’s immaterialism on the one hand and Thomas Hobbes’s mechanistic philosophy on the other. Cavendish and Milton often incorporate depictions of Sidneian and Hobbesian extremes into their works as voices of temptation—dramatizing their appeal but ultimately rejecting them. Between Sidney’s aloof poet-god and Hobbes’s witty arranger of sense data, Cavendish and Milton open a space for a poetics of material extension and embeddedness in which the poet willingly and gladly remains “wrapped within the fold of the proposed subject.”