Footnote:
This edition also issued in print: 2020. - Includes bibliographical references and index. - Description based on online resource; title from home page (viewed on October 20, 2020)
Description:
This text 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 work argues, into understandings of poetry as a modern devotional practice.