Augustine, a rhetorician in Milan, experienced a profound conversion in a garden, prompted by reading Romans and the voice of a child chanting 'take and read.' This event transformed him from a Manichaean skeptic into a Christian theologian, leading to his baptism by Ambrose and his eventual ordination. Augustine's conversion became the most famous spiritual autobiography in Western literature.

Augustine's Confessions established the genre of spiritual autobiography and shaped the confessional mode of Western poetry from Dante's Vita Nuova to T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets. His interior, introspective style influenced the development of the lyric 'I' in English poetry from the Psalms to the Romantic poets.