"This is an important work that scholars will want to return to often. . . . Summing Up: Highly recommended."

CHOICE

"Insightful . . . . Coming To follows a doubled trajectory: insisting on poetry’s embeddedness in the history of consciousness and narrating the emergence of consciousness as fundamental to the development of early modern poetry. Harrison brings to life this entanglement through subtle, close readings of the early modern poets Thomas Traherne and John Milton, and the philosopher John Locke, all situated within their shared cultural matrix. . . . Harrison’s book will be of interest to scholars of Renaissance literature, religion, and philosophy, particularly in the areas of experiential spirituality, devotional writing, and embodiment. Additionally, Coming To contributes to our understanding of the entwined early modern discourses of subjectivity, consciousness, and identity."

John Yargo | Renaissance and Reformation

"Harrison is a comprehensive scholar. . . . The arc of consciousness and its history is so wide that Harrison comes close to becoming an intellectual polymath as he leads the reader through his book. I have already found myself returning to it more than once."

Sun News Tuscon

“Harrison argues that the notion of consciousness emerged over the course of the seventeenth century by being connected with another concern: natality, the earliest, infant experiences of existence, beginning in the fetal state. This is original scholarship and thought, immensely and accurately learned, impressive in every way, and is likely to become a standard in the field of seventeenth-century studies, on a shelf with Martz, Lewalski, and Colie. I have read few books in a long time that are as technically accomplished and that strike me as not only interesting but also as important.”

Gordon Teskey, Harvard University

“Harrison is an acute student of philosophy, an erudite guide to intellectual history, and a sensitive and revelatory reader of poetry. As in the very best studies of poetry and its intellectual contexts, Harrison demonstrates that poets do not merely reflect philosophical developments, they also shape them. In Coming To, Harrison, tracing a line from Descartes through Milton and Traherne to Locke, unearths the contribution of two poets to modern understandings of consciousness.”

Stephen M. Fallon, Cavanaugh Professor of the Humanities, University of Notre Dame