The Religious Sublime Christian Poetry and Critical Tradition in 18th-Century England |
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| Author:
| Morris, David B. |
| ISBN: | 978-0-8131-8639-9 |
| Publication Date: | Oct 2025 |
| Publisher: | University Press of Kentucky
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| Book Format: | Ebook |
| List Price: | USD $38.85 |
Book Description:
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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...
More 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.