The Religious Sublime : Christian Poetry and Critical Tradition in 18th-Century England

Morris, David B.

The University Press of Kentucky（2014/07発売）

• 製本 Paperback:紙装版/ペーパーバック版／ページ数 274 p.
• 言語 ENG
• 商品コード 9780813153612
• DDC分類 821.00931

Full Description

This perceptive, carefully documented study challenges the traditional assumption that the supernatural virtually disappeared from eighteenth-century poetry as a result of the growing rationalistic temper of the late seventeenth century. Mr. Morris shows that the religious poetry of eighteenth-century England, while not equaling the brilliant work of seventeenth-century and Romantic writers, does reveal a vital and serious effort to create a new kind of sacred poetry which would rival the sublimity of Milton and of the Bible itself.

Tracing the major varieties of religious poetry written throughout the century -- by major figures and by their now vanished contemporaries -- the author explains how later poets and critics made significant departures from the established norms. These changes in religious poetry thus become a valuable means of understanding the shift from a neoclassical to a Romantic theory of literature.