Callaghan, Madeleine. Eternity in British Romantic Poetry

Abstract

Madeleine Callaghan’s Eternity in British Romantic Poetry offers precisely what its title promises. Through chapters focused on William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats and Felicia Hemans, Callaghan explores Romantic poetry’s attitudes toward and renderings of eternity. Except in the case of Hemans, eternity in Callaghan’s book refers not to ‘sempiternity,’ or simple endlessness (p. 251), but rather to ‘an arena separate from time and space, those mortal constraints, delivering a wholeness and perfection only possible beyond and outside of the world in which humans live’ (p. 11). Depending on the poet, eternity may or may not be divine, and it may or may not actually exist. Although Callaghan often points out religious and philosophical sources for the poets’ ideas, she wisely avoids getting mired in a game of ‘spot the philosophic influence’ (p. 290). Instead, she focuses on the poems themselves. Refreshingly unembarrassed by the religious faith held by some of these writers, Callaghan takes seriously the seven poets’ various dealings with this question: ‘how might poetry access, express, and understand eternity, if eternity exists?’ (p. 1).