Interlude

The book as a whole emphasizes a productive discontinuity between various eighteenth-century poets and both their Miltonic sources and their Romantic successors. Two interludes, however, qualify this picture by showing how a mortalist poetics, shared by the late Milton and some early Romantic writers, persisted in between the two in certain quarters of Enlightenment England. The second interlude interprets Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751), still perhaps the eighteenth century’s most famous poem, alongside William Cowper’s Sapphic lyric “Hatred and Vengeance, My Eternal Portion” (1774). While Gray’s elegy presents a disembodied heaven as no freer or happier than a common burial site, and worse for being more isolated, Cowper’s bleak poem imagines that hell offers his soul a kind of protection that he lacks during his embodied life on the earth’s surface.

Commerce after Money

This chapter addresses the extractive logic of the poet Edward Young. It shows how his late masterpiece Night Thoughts at once extends and complicates the imperialism of his earlier work. At the heart of the analysis is Young’s notion that movement somehow generates depth, so that the mobility of a gold coin produces inner value, immaterial worth ready to be drawn out by its user. The treasure, on Young’s strange view, lies within the gold. Night Thoughts applies this thinking to the spiritual realm. Instead of assuming that it is God who extracts souls from bodies—as workers remove ore from mines—the poem suggests that souls can extract themselves from materiality through religious and poetic inspiration. Then they can delve into the interiorities of other angelic beings and exchange thoughts and feelings with them. Closing the chapter are a comparison to Charles Johnstone’s popular it-narrative Chrysal (1760–5) and a reading of Ignatius Sancho’s gushing praise for Night Thoughts.

Gender after Sex

Leading off a new section, this chapter maintains that Elizabeth Singer Rowe—an early eighteenth-century devotional writer who was once a household name on both sides of the Atlantic—discovered in the promise of life after death the prospect of gender after sex. The chapter, which accounts for the full span of Rowe’s career, argues that her ecstatic verse initially defines femininity in terms of spirit. (Matter she codes as masculine, polemically associating it with the libertines.) Later letters and poems develop a further idea of femininity as a power of self-reinvention. Disembodied and feminized souls can creatively remake themselves in the afterlife and perhaps also in poetry capable of propelling readers and writers there ahead of time. The chapter ends by considering Rowe’s place in scholarly accounts of “feminization” in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Her enthusiasm, it concludes, released her at times from the exemplary femininity that modern critics have too often taken her to illustrate.

Interlude

The book as a whole emphasizes a productive discontinuity between various eighteenth-century poets and both their Miltonic sources and their Romantic successors. Two interludes, however, qualify this picture by showing how a mortalist poetics, shared by the late Milton and some early Romantic writers, persisted in between the two in certain quarters of Enlightenment England. The first interlude focuses on the poet James Thomson. It identifies and discusses a few of the theological implications of his Poem Sacred to the Memory of Isaac Newton (1727) and his revisions to The Seasons (1730).

An Education for the Present

This chapter focuses on John Milton’s Paradise Regain’d (1671), arguing that a mortalist temporality keeps its hero’s education unfinished. To explain why Milton’s brief epic is such a strangely presentist work, with both the past and the deep future of the Son of God inaccessible, the chapter places the poem in a fresh theological context and establishes points of continuity with John Biddle, the Socinian firebrand who wrote the Confession of Faith Touching the Holy Trinity (1648) and probably translated the Racovian Catechism (1652). But Milton goes further than Biddle and the Socinians do, the chapter proposes, in constraining the Son’s knowledge about himself and his purpose. Trying to extend the poetic now, spliced between the old and the new, the poem invites readers to join the Son in resisting the temptation to reach too far ahead, to the expected consolations of resurrection and then heaven.

Romantic Re-embodiment and Beyond

This final chapter has two distinct objectives. The first half approaches William Wordsworth as an exemplary poet of the moderate Enlightenment, offsetting his early desire to fly from physicality with a mortalist return to the material world that (like Milton before him) Wordsworth sees as proof of his own theological maturity. Yet neither in religious devotion nor in poetic practice would the spiritualist outlook simply fade into the past. The second half of the chapter identifies two strands of Romanticism that, in contrast to the Wordsworthian sort, keep open the possibility of a further disembodiment (a re-disembodiment) still to come. The authors who furnish brief case studies in the latter part are Phillis Wheatley, William Blake, and Emily Dickinson, who shared a common source in Edward Young. For all three visionary poets, to imagine looking beyond a modest materialism meant looking back, yet again, to Night Thoughts.

Creation after Reproduction

This chapter locates Mark Akenside at a point where counter-materialist theology and poetic theory weirdly converge with speculative embryology. The poet and physician held that human beings break into a new category of existence as they advance to an immaterial state, but normal sexual reproduction extends material life as it is. According to Akenside’s MD dissertation, God and the mother do all the work in the latter process and sperm have no functional role to play. His poetry compensates for this picture of men alienated from reproductive futurity, the chapter argues, by assigning certain male poets a power that was often (and notoriously) seen as maternal: they can impress their imaginations on the bodies and minds of other people and so steer humanity toward a different kind of future. The chapter culminates in an extended comparison to Erasmus Darwin, another poet-physician trained in embryology and, as it happens, another rare theorist of the power of paternal impressions.

Introduction

The introductory chapter elaborates definitions of two opposed but entangled poetic tendencies, calling one mortalist and the other spiritualist. It draws extended examples from John Milton (particularly from Paradise Lost [1667] and De Doctrina Christiana); from Edward Young (especially from Night Thoughts [1742–6], identified as the poem central to the study); and from several late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Anglophone poets, including Lucie Brock-Broido, Michael Symmons Roberts, Danez Smith, Tracy K. Smith, and Kevin Young. Some of these writers, the chapter argues, surprisingly keep alive a poetics of disembodiment derived from the Enlightenment. The introduction ends with a discussion of some relevant questions in literary criticism (concerning materialism, Pre-Romanticism, historical poetics, and lyric studies) and then a personal word about the author’s perspective on the spiritualities explored in the book.

The Place for Gloom

Beginning the final section of the book, which shows how early Romanticism tames the spiritualist impulse, this chapter considers poetic re-embodiment in relation to psychological depression, called “gloom” by the poet and critic Anna Letitia Barbauld. She faulted Edward Young for having popularized a dangerously gloomy sublimity that, by separating souls from bodies, desensitized readers to subtle and modest everyday feelings. As a remedy, her writing praises the enlightened “chearfulness” of Mark Akenside, a healthy middle register of embodied emotion that is neither too dark nor too bright. Yet Barbauld eventually came to agree, the chapter argues, with medical experts who had decided that melancholy is an affliction more of matter than mind. Late poems, crowned by Eighteen Hundred and Eleven (1812), both accept that gloom belongs in the physical body and identify the poet’s own voice with that body. De-souled and dispirited, Barbauld at last domesticates Young’s otherworldly passion. She makes depression political by making it ordinary.