How might our reading (and teaching) of Pulter’s verse change during a period characterized by historically specific and widely shared, if still inequitable, experiences of isolation? This Exploration addresses that question by interspersing lines from one of Pulter’s poems, Why Must I Thus Forever Be Confined57, with the reflections of students in Elizabeth Zeman Kolkovich’s “British Literature, Medieval to 1800” online course at Ohio State University. (Responses have been lightly edited and are published with the approval of the authors.)

These students read Pulter’s poem in the spring of 2021, in the context of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, which had by that point been unfolding for a full year. In this context, Kolkovich asked her students to comment on how the poem spoke to them. She notes, “I think I found their responses so moving because I know most of them only as names and black Zoom boxes, or maybe a still photo—and these posts helped me see the people they are, with all their challenges and hopes.”

This Exploration is offered as a source of possible inspiration for other instructors seeking to integrate Pulter’s verse into their courses in the wake of the global pandemic, which has recalibrated almost everyone’s sensitivity to the experience and ramifications of different degrees and kinds of isolation.

Pandemic or not, the resonant theme of isolation can be integrated into a unit on Pulter’s verse with relative ease. She already has a growing reputation as a poet of isolation—not only because her manuscript met with no known readers for centuries, but also because of various poems where the speaker ruminates on confinement and the deprivation of liberty. In A Solitary Complaint54, for instance, she asks, "Must I be still confined to this sad grove / Whenas those vast and glorious globes above / Eternally in treble motions move?" (lines 1–3.)

The very next poem (Must I Thus Ever Interdicted Be55) opens with a variation on this inquiry: “Must I thus ever interdicted be, / My gracious God?” (lines 1–2). The implication is that she is forbidden from entering church; she goes on to note that “The wanton sparrow and the chaster dove / Within Thy sacred temple freely move” (lines 10–11)—birds have freedom, but not her.

Being stuck in a grove or forbidden from church: these conditions are challenging enough, but in Made When I Was Not Well51, Pulter refers to her very body as a “loathsome ruined prison” (line 2) for her soul. Elsewhere, addressing a period of illness when she longs to die, she laments to (and of) her soul: “thou cans’t not go, / Thy Great Creator, He says, ‘no’” (Made When My Spirits Were Sunk Very Low With Sickness and Sorrow66, lines 7–8). To experience one’s own embodied self as a site of captivity is bad indeed—although, from her spiritual perspective, it was also and paradoxically a salutary realization or remembrance, since it kept her attention and devotion appropriately focused beyond the body.

In The Center30, however, Pulter lets herself imagine not spiritual salvation but simply her own thoughts as a countervailing force against such bodily confinement; at least, she briefly interrogates the possibility that her thoughts can fly where no body might (line 24); she lets them levitate a while before humbly summoning their inevitable descent: “my thoughts, to native earth descend” (line 37). Confinement within a body on earth is the natural habitat not just of Pulter’s person (or all persons, really), but of Pulter’s poetic persona—nonetheless, her resistance to that confinement comes just as naturally, or perhaps artfully.

Pulter’s experiences of confinement were, in many ways, particular to her historical circumstances: one poem, for instance, presents itself as having been composed during a culturally-defined period of “lying in” assigned to women who had just given birth in early modern England (This Was Written in 1648, When I Lay in, With my Son John45). Today, many if not most people’s circumstances and experiences of confinement and isolation have been radically reinscribed since the spring of 2020 and the global spread of COVID-19. How might readers of the future look back on our own accounts of this experience? We can only imagine.