Katherine Philips, Meta-Metaphysical Poet

Lecture by Arya Sureshbabu, Ph.D. Candidate in English, University of California, Berkeley. Recipient of the 2024–25 Kenneth Karmiole Endowed Graduate Research Fellowship

Katherine Philips (1632–64) occupies an unusual place in the canon of seventeenth-century poetry. Now alternatively billed as an apostle of female friendship or a proto-sapphic icon, she was also known in her own time as an exemplary practitioner of intimacy. But a less adulatory strain of reception history reads her verse as overstuffed with hyperbolic praise and extended conceits that fail to sustain readerly interest. This talk suggests that these seemingly contradictory assessments of Philips are in fact connected: her poems and letters express closeness through a disproportionate outpouring of attention to minor details, petty situations, and all-too-earthly individuals. Philips’s preoccupation with the interplay between excess and diminution is as stylistic as it is thematic; her copious adaptations of her poetic predecessors index a process of intimate reading in addition to describing intimate relationships among members of her literary coterie. Her self-conscious reflections on the twinned practices of reading and writing are especially evident in her embellishments of John Donne’s poems, where she iteratively revises his images with an assiduousness that anticipates modern characterizations of the metaphysical conceit’s simultaneous fragility and force. Taking these resonances as a point of departure, this presentation explores how Philips’s poetics blur the lines between affection, interpretation, and creative endeavor—and how eighteenth-century readers’ fleeting encounters with her literary output remix and reactivate its intimate potentials.

Arya Sureshbabu is a PhD candidate in English with a Designated Emphasis in Renaissance and Early Modern Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is completing a dissertation on intimacy and textual minutiae in the poetry, drama, and correspondence of the English Renaissance. In addition to the Center & Clark, her work has been supported by the Beinecke Library, the Harry Ransom Center, the UC Humanities Research Institute, and the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender. Essays drawn from her dissertation are forthcoming in Shakespeare Studies and The Cambridge Companion to Aemilia Lanyer. She has further academic interests in Shakespearean adaptations, early modern women writers, and epistolary form.

The lecture will take place via Zoom. To register to attend, please fill out the form here.

Image: Detail from Insert 1r of Negotiolum bellae (Clark Library MS.1986.003), an eighteenth-century commonplace book that features poems by Katherine Philips and was passed down among women in the Springett family. The fully digitized manuscript is available here: https://calisphere.org/item/ark:/21198/n1vg7z/.