Eternity in British Romantic Poetry

Abstract

Eternity in British Romantic Poetry explores the representation of the relationship between eternity and the mortal world in the poetry of the period. This monograph offers an original approach to Romanticism that demonstrates, against the grain, the dominant intellectual preoccupation of the period: the relationship between the mortal and the eternal. The project’s scope is two-fold: firstly, it analyses the prevalence and range of images of eternity (from apocalypse, and afterlife, to transcendence) in Romantic poetry; secondly, it opens up a new and more nuanced focus on how Romantic poets imagined and interacted with the idea of eternity. Every poet featured in this monograph seeks and finds their uniqueness in their apprehension of eternity. From Blake’s assertion of the Eternal Now to Keats’s defiance of eternity, Wordsworth’s ‘two consciousnesses’ versus Coleridge’s capacious poetry, Byron’s swithering between versions of eternity compared to Shelleyan yearning, and Hemans’s superlative account of everlasting female suffering, each poet finds new versions of eternity to explore or reject. Eternity in British Romantic Poetry offers a paradigm-shifting focus upon the aesthetic and philosophical power of eternity in Romantic poetry.