Futures of Enlightenment Poetry

Dustin D. Stewart

Develops a revisionist history of English poetry, and specifically the meditative long poem, from Milton to early Romanticism
Approaches the reading and writing of poetry as spiritual practice and a way of experiencing the future here and now
Offers extended interpretations of both major and minor poems, placing them in fresh historical, theoretical, and theological contexts
Contributes to ongoing debates about the role of religion in the Enlightenment

Futures of Enlightenment Poetry

Dustin D. Stewart

Description

This book offers a revisionist account of poetry and embodiment from Milton to Romanticism. Scholars have made much of the period's theories of matter, with some studies equating the eighteenth century's modernity with its materialism. Yet the Enlightenment in Britain also brought bold new arguments for the immateriality of spirit and evocative claims about an imminent spirit realm. Protestant religious writing was of two minds about futurity, swinging back and forth between patience for the resurrected body and desire for the released soul. This ancient pattern carried over, the book argues, into understandings of poetry as a modern devotional practice.

A range of authors agreed that poems can provide a foretaste of the afterlife, but they disagreed about what kind of future state the imagination should seek. The mortalist impulse—exemplified by John Milton and by Romantic poets Anna Letitia Barbauld and William Wordsworth—is to overcome the temptation of disembodiment and to restore spirit to its rightful home in matter. The spiritualist impulse—driving eighteenth-century verse by Mark Akenside, Elizabeth Singer Rowe, and Edward Young—is to break out of bodily repetition and enjoy the detached soul's freedom in advance. Although the study isolates these two tendencies, each needed the other as a source in the Enlightenment, and their productive opposition didn't end with Romanticism. The final chapter identifies an alternative Romantic vision that keeps open the possibility of a disembodied poetics, and the introduction considers present-day Anglophone writers who put it into practice.

Futures of Enlightenment Poetry

Dustin D. Stewart

Introduction: Futurity Two Ways, from Milton to Now
Movement One: Waiting in Matter
1:An Education for the Present
Interlude: Animating Nature
Movement Two: Rising to Spirit
2:Gender after Sex
3:Commerce after Money
4:Creation after Reproduction
Interlude: Buried Alive
Movement Three: Returning to Matter
5:The Place for Gloom
6:Romantic Re-embodiment and Beyond
Bibliography

Futures of Enlightenment Poetry

Dustin D. Stewart

Author Information

Dustin D. Stewart, Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University

Dustin D. Stewart is an Assistant Professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. He earned his PhD at the University of Texas at Austin and held academic posts in Atlanta and Colorado Springs before moving to New York City. Futures of Enlightenment Poetry is his first book.

Futures of Enlightenment Poetry

Dustin D. Stewart

Reviews and Awards

Winner of the 2021 Louis Gottschalk Prize from the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies

"the book strongly illuminates not only individual poets, some of whom have been insufficiently studied, but also the connections among them. In examining these poets, Stewart displays considerable erudition and sensitivity to literary theory and literary history as well as to the historical context framing the poetry he studies." - Henry Weinfield, University of Notre Dame, Review 19

"Stewart charts an exciting revisionist account of the way poetry negotiates the boundary between spirit and matter. The story he tells of the poets who grapple with the notion of disembodiment and re-embodiment presents a new genealogy of Enlightenment poetry, placing James Thomson, Thomas Gray, Edward Young, William Cowper, Elizabeth Singer Rowe, Mark Akenside, and Anna Letitia Barbauld at the center of a narrative that unfolds from Milton's Paradise Lost to Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey". Grounding his discussion in detailed accounts of eighteenth-century practice, Stewart presents a reading of Enlightenment poetry that will change the field of historical poetics." - Elizabeth Kraft, University of Georgia