Apocalypse and Millennium in English Romantic Poetry [Hardcover]

The interrelationship of apocalypse and millennium is a dominant concern in British Romanticism. The Book of Revelation provides a model of history in which apocalypse is followed by millennium, but the major Romantic poets question the possibility of a successful secularization of this model. Is history developing towards end time and millennium, or is it cyclical and purposeless?

Introduction
Blake
Coleridge
Wordsworth
Byron
Shelley
Keats
Bibliography
Index

The overall process indicated in professor Paley's study, by which the imaginary of Revelation dissolved over a few years from an organized biblical pattern of the understanding of current events to a range of images for less coherent subsequent interpretations emerges as a fascinating phenomenon, for which he has provided the first- and definitive -guide. --Notes and Queries

is a seminar that challenges students of the period to wrestle with a genre of Romantic poetry that has often seemed inscrutable. --European Romantic Review

An informative introductory overview setting out biblical sources of apocalypse and millennium, seventeenth-century millenarianism in the English Revolution, catastrophist theory in writers like Thomas Burnet, and the gathering millennial excitement among eighteenth-century Illuminati and the Swedenborgians...Paley reveals for the first time and in impressive detail the extraordinary diversity of millennarianism in English Romantic poetry. He commands the full range of biblical references to apocalypse and millennium, and his close reading elucidates echoes of and allusions to biblical sources which saturate the poems. --Nicholas Roe,The Times Literary Supplement

This book makes a major and timely contribution to Romantic studies...Political philosophy and aesthetics are both given a hearing: connecting apocalypse and millennium is a matter of success or (mostly) failure for these poetslC-