Futures of Enlightenment Poetry

by Dustin D. Stewart

Overview

This book 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 book argues, into understandings of poetry as a modern devotional practice. A range of authors agreed that poems can provide a foretaste of the afterlife, but they disagreed about what kind of future state the imagination should seek. The mortalist impulse--exemplified by John Milton and by Romantic poets Anna Letitia Barbauld and William Wordsworth--is to overcome the temptation of disembodiment and to restore spirit to its rightful home in matter. The spiritualist impulse--driving eighteenth-century verse by Mark Akenside, Elizabeth Singer Rowe, and Edward Young--is to break out of bodily repetition and enjoy the detached soul's freedom in advance. Although the study isolates these two tendencies, each needed the other as a source in the Enlightenment, and their productive opposition didn't end with Romanticism. The final chapter identifies an alternative Romantic vision that keeps open the possibility of a disembodied poetics, and the introduction considers present-day Anglophone writers who put it into practice.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780192599643
Publisher:	OUP Oxford
Publication date:	10/30/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Dustin D. Stewart is an Assistant Professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. He earned his PhD at the University of Texas at Austin and held academic posts in Atlanta and Colorado Springs before moving to New York City. Futures of Enlightenment Poetry is his first book.

Table of Contents

• Introduction: Futurity Two Ways, from Milton to Now
• Movement One: Waiting in Matter
• 1: An Education for the Present
• Interlude: Animating Nature
• Movement Two: Rising to Spirit
• 2: Gender after Sex
• 3: Commerce after Money
• 4: Creation after Reproduction
• Interlude: Buried Alive
• Movement Three: Returning to Matter
• 5: The Place for Gloom
• 6: Romantic Re-embodiment and Beyond
• Bibliography

Editorial Reviews

"In working always to connect the past, present, and future through the reciprocal influence of ideas, texts, and beliefs, Stewart takes seriously disembodied poetics as devotional practice." — Emma Mason, University of Warwick, The Journal of Religion

"... Futures of Enlightenment Poetry is an innovative contribution to historical poetics, not least because it puts forward a grounded and persuasive thesis about the complex conditions for a poetics that propels itself into the future." — Mary Helen McMurran, University of Western Ontario, Genre

"Stewart's book is a powerful reminder not just about the fecundity of this spiritualist tradition but-even more importantly-that "disembodiment and re-embodiment do seem to need each other and to correct for one another's excess, to belong together if only in their incompatibility." — Jess Keiser, Modern Philology

"the book strongly illuminates not only individual poets, some of whom have been insufficiently studied, but also the connections among them. In examining these poets, Stewart displays considerable erudition and sensitivity to literary theory and literary history as well as to the historical context framing the poetry he studies." — Henry Weinfield, University of Notre Dame, Review 19

"Stewart charts an exciting revisionist account of the way poetry negotiates the boundary between spirit and matter. The story he tells of the poets who grapple with the notion of disembodiment and re-embodiment presents a new genealogy of Enlightenment poetry, placing James Thomson, Thomas Gray, Edward Young, William Cowper, Elizabeth Singer Rowe, Mark Akenside, and Anna Letitia Barbauld at the center of a narrative that unfolds from Milton's Paradise Lost to Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey". Grounding his discussion in detailed accounts of eighteenth-century practice, Stewart presents a reading of Enlightenment poetry that will change the field of historical poetics." — Elizabeth Kraft, University of Georgia

"Dustin Stewart's Futures of Enlightenment Poetry begins its argument on its cover...A lithe Christ refuses the tempting banquet and its beckoning revelers, while a bearded Satan floats in the fiery plane above, his look of fear dividing the scene and providing a counterpoint to Christ's determined gaze...He reframes the story of Enlightenment poetry through the cycles of this push and pull, which leave neither spirit nor matter quite the same." — Misty G.Anderson, University of Tennessee, Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 56, No. 4

"Futures of Enlightenment Poetry proposes rich new ways of exploring the period. Stewart's work is a testament to the relevance of theology and poetry for eighteenth-century studies, and of eighteenth-century studies for humanistic understanding writ large." — Melissa Schoenberger, The Scriblerian and the Kit-Cats

From the Publisher