Watson, NicholasMaxwell, Andrew2026-06-0920262026-06-052026Maxwell, Andrew. 2026. Love is a Wonderful Eye: Contemplative Literature and the Poetics of Attention. Doctoral Dissertation, Harvard University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.32702411https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/42740516This project examines the central works of contemplative and mystical literature written in Middle English, focusing on the ways in which the writings of Richard Rolle, the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing, and Julian of Norwich reshape contemporary questions about the potential relationships between form, affect, and readerly experience in literary study. Drawing from recent scholarship at the intersection of religion and literature that has emphasized the rigor of devotional modes of both writing and reading, I analyze the strategies by which late medieval religious texts attempt, not only to educate or instruct, but also to transform their readers. In so doing, I demonstrate the interwoven nature of spiritual practice and poetic craft: arguing that these texts embody their engagements with the divine through intricate deployments of language, style, and form, this project elaborates the unexpected contributions offered by medieval religious writing to current literary study and expression. In particular, I follow Lucy Alford, David Marno, and Donald Revell in exploring how these medieval texts complicate the recent turn toward attention as a vital mode of interaction between writer, text, reader, and world. Each of my chapters thus considers a different formal feature of contemplative writing in relation to the practices of attention for which these texts advocate. But I begin with modern poetry, examining apophatic poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, Wallace Stevens, and R.S. Thomas in order to outline what I call “the poetics of attention,” focusing especially on the boundaries created between reader and situation by modern approaches to the poetic object as such. The subsequent three chapters present different ways in which contemplative literature transgresses or transcends those modern boundaries. In my second chapter, I consider how authorial voice creates a powerful sense of textual intimacy in the works of the Cloud-author, particularly in relation to different forms of linguistic and structural repetition and the transformative potential of the written word. My third chapter focuses on a central image of attention shared by Richard Rolle and the Cloud-author, unravelling the relationships between practices of prayer, mystical ecstasy, and the poetic violence undergone by writers and readers of apophatic texts. Such relationships are then further interrogated by my fourth chapter, which explores verbal and imagistic itineraries of attention in the writings of Julian of Norwich, especially A Revelation of Love, and the ways in which these itineraries complicate the clear distinction between her written account of visionary experience and that experience itself. As this study ultimately argues, these essential works of Middle English contemplative literature offer a distinctly experimental perspective on the poetics of attention: in approaching the limits of both poetics and attention, the writings of Richard Rolle, the Cloud-author, and Julian of Norwich show how transgressive textual forms may push beyond description to enact and incite new forms of spiritual experience.application/pdfenapophatic theologyattentionMiddle Englishmystical theologymysticismpoeticsMedieval literatureThesis or Dissertation2026-06-090009-0009-5894-4446