Secular Chains

Poetry and the Politics of Religion from Milton to Pope

Philip Connell

Offers an original and richly contextualized account of the relationship between poetry and religious controversy between 1649 and 1745
Uses close readings of the work of a range of canonical poets to re-evaluate the relationship between English literary culture and the political challenges to religious authority that emerged in the wake of the civil wars
Provides a new framework for understanding a complex and turbulent period in English literary history

Secular Chains

Poetry and the Politics of Religion from Milton to Pope

Philip Connell

Description

Secular Chains offers an original and richly contextualized account of the relationship between poetry and religious controversy between 1649 and 1745. This was a period of political conflict and intellectual upheaval, in which traditional sources of spiritual authority were variously challenged and transformed. This study reveals the importance of English literary culture for our understanding of this process and sheds new light on the dynamics of change and continuity between the puritan revolution and the early Enlightenment.

Based on extensive research in both printed and manuscript sources, the book combines detailed case studies of major literary figures with a sustained historical narrative linking the republican moment of the 1650s, the conflicts and crises of the Restoration, and the ecclesiastical politics of the early eighteenth century. Milton and Dryden provide the principal focus of the first three chapters, which explore the divisive issue of church settlement in the work of both writers, together with the increasingly prominent rhetoric of anti-clericalism and irreligion in the poetry and polemics of the later seventeenth century. Subsequent chapters extend the book's argument to the embattled condition of the Church of England in the decades after 1688 and the significant contribution of contemporary literary culture to a range of religious and philosophical argument, from heterodox free-thinking to Newtonian natural theology. Secular Chains demonstrates the close and continued relationship between poetry and religious politics in the age of Milton and Pope and provides a new framework for understanding this complex and turbulent period in English literary history.

Secular Chains

Poetry and the Politics of Religion from Milton to Pope

Philip Connell

Introduction
PART I: COMMONWEALTH
1. 'Hireling wolves': Poetry, Prophecy and Republican Religion
PART II: RESTORATION
2. The Failure of Uniformity
3. 'Priests of all Religions are the same': Dryden and the Politics of Irreligion
PART III: ENLIGHTENMENT
4. Whig Poetics and the Church in Danger
5. The Literature of Physico-Theology
6. Alexander Pope and the Modes of Faith
Coda: Pope, Milton, Modernity

Secular Chains

Poetry and the Politics of Religion from Milton to Pope

Philip Connell

Author Information

Philip Connell was educated at the University of Liverpool and completed his Ph.D. at King's College, Cambridge. He is currently a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of English and a Fellow of Selwyn College at the University of Cambridge. He has published widely on English literature and its contexts between 1650 and 1840, with a particular emphasis upon interdisciplinary studies in the fields of poetry, politics, and intellectual history.

Secular Chains

Poetry and the Politics of Religion from Milton to Pope

Philip Connell

Reviews and Awards

"a brilliant intervention into early eighteenth-century studies." --Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies

"The resulting volume may be mined by specialists for individually brilliant essays ... Almost every chapter highlights successive generations of Whigs' and Tories' efforts to tame, sublimate, or appropriate Milton's legacy ... His measured approach is a refreshing alternative to the pugilistic tones of an older generation of revisionist history" -- Niall Allsopp, Modern Philology

"Connell is both an adept and insightful critic with a fine eye for detail and a learned scholar, and this book is likely to shape our understanding of the period for many years to come." --Andrew Hadfield, English Historical Review

"There is much to admire here... He drives a brilliantly illuminating analysis through the shifts in post-Restoration and early eighteenth-century high literary culture." -- Thomas N. Corns, The Seventeenth Century.

"Connell's study is based on an astounding amount of research into print and manuscript sources of the period, here synthesized with enviable grace and fluency. It is a book of enormous erudition and subtlety." --Matthew C. Augustine, Huntington Library Quarterly

"In Secular Chains: Poetry and the Politics of Religion from Milton to Pope, Philip Connell offers a richly informative discussion of religion, poetry, and politics in Milton and Marvell ... Connell's book is a welcome addition to studies of Restoration and early eighteenth-century poetry." --George E. Haggerty, SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900

"an exceptional scholarly study, impeccably researched, expertly structured, persuasively argued, and engagingly written ... Connell has done better than others in a project that few critics have been emboldened to attempt" --Eighteenth-Century Studies

"drives a brilliantly illuminating analysis through the shifts in post-Restoration and early eighteenth-century high literary culture [...] Connell successfully redresses a dominant tendency to read post-Restoration literature as the embodiment of a secularizing progression towards modernity, and the study of "Milton's reading, and misreading" discloses much more than a simple reception history." --Thomas N. Corns, Seventeenth Century

"fascinating and wide-ranging [...] Students of eighteenth-century poetry have needed a book like Secular Chains for a long time." --Joseph Hone, Review of English Studies