The Field of Imagination: Thomas Paine and Eighteenth-Century Poetry

One of America’s Founding Fathers, Thomas Paine is best remembered as the pamphleteer who inspired the American Revolution. Yet few also know him as an eighteenth-century poet of considerable repute. In The Field of Imagination, Scott Cleary offers the first book on Paine’s poetry, exploring how poetry written both by and about Paine is central to understanding his development as a political theorist.

Despite his claim in The Age of Reason that he was abandoning poetry because it led too mu...