Milton, the Metaphysicals, and Romanticism

Detailed analysis of the relationship between seventeenth-century literature and Romanticism.

Lisa Low (Edited by), Anthony John Harding (Edited by)

9780521110693, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 7 May 2009

288 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm, 0.43 kg

Both the English Civil War and the French Revolution produced in England an outpouring of literature reflecting intense belief in the arrival of a better world, and new philosophies of the relationship between mind, language and cosmos. Milton, the Metaphysicals, and Romanticism is the first book to explore the significance of the connections between the literature of these two periods. The volume analyses Milton's influence on Romantic writers including Blake, Beckford, Wordsworth, Shelley, Radcliffe and Keats, and examines the relationships between other seventeenth-century poets - Donne, Marvell, Vaughan, Herrick, Cowley, Rochester and Dryden - and Romantic writers. Representing a wide range of theoretical approaches, and including original contributions by leading British, American and Canadian scholars, this is a provocative and challenging assessment of the relationship between two of the richest periods of British literary history.

Introduction
Milton, the metaphysicals, and romanticism: reading the past, reflecting the present Lisa Elaine Low and Anthony John Harding
1. The other reading transactional epic in Milton, Blake, and Wordsworth Tilottama Rajan
2. Newton's pantocrator and Blake's recovery of Miltonic prophecy G. A. Rosso
3. Milton's hell: William Beckford's place in the graphic and the literary tradition Elinor Shaffer
4. How theories of Romanticism exclude women Radcliffe, Milton, and the legitimation of the gothic novel Annette Wheeler Cafarelli
5. Wordsworth, Milton, and the inward light Nicola Zoe Trott
6. De-fencing the poet: The political dilemma of the poet and the people in Milton's Second Defense and Shelley's Defence of Poetry Michael Chappell
7. Keats's Marginalia in Paradise Lost Beth Lau
8. What the mower does to the meadow: action and reflection in Wordsworth and Marvell Frederick Burwick
9. Kidnapping the poets: the Romantics and Henry Vaughan John T. Shawcross
10. 'Against the Stream Upwards': Coleridge's Recovery of John Donne Anthony John Harding
11. Coleridge, Keats, Lamb and seventeenth-century drinking songs Anya Taylor
12. Marvell, Keats, Wallace Stevens, and the (early) modern meditation poem Lisa Elaine Low.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]