Timing the Apocalypse: The Career of Religious Musings

Abstract

Coleridge’s early poem Religious Musings is normally taken to illustrate the apocalypticism that appeared in British radical discourse with the outbreak of the French Revolution. In this essay I try to reassess the poem’s apocalyptic commitments. Rather than simply exhibiting apocalyptic tendencies that were common in radical circles, Religious Musings presents a critique of revolutionary apocalypticism. This critiques is visible first of all in the alternative forms of temporal experience that Coleridge clusters alongside the poem’s announcement of the coming apocalypse: the presence of the desultory and of the life in time experienced by the elect unsettles the poem’s apparent apocalypticism. In the end, Religious Musings finds value in temporality: for Coleridge, even at this early stage in his career, events find their primary significance in relation to time. I also suggest that this commitment to temporality should not be read as a loss of hope for political change; rather, by recognizing the constraints that time and history place upon political actors, Coleridge means to salvage the possibility of liberal politics. I conclude the essay by examining the role that Religious Musings plays in Coleridge’s 1796 collection, where it appears as the final poem. Religious Musings provides in its emphasis on temporality a model for organizing and thereby validating the diversity of genres, emotions, and ideas that marks Coleridge’s first book of poetry.