‘Till all my sense is lost in infinite’

This chapter traces Anna Letitia Barbauld’s long-standing project to reassert an emotional aspect to Rational Dissenting prayer, which threatened to slip into sterilely intellectual contemplation. However, evoking various affective legacies relevant to Dissenting sensibility—from Isaac Watts to Edward Young—creates poems that struggle to reconcile the competing pulls of reason and passion. Whilst a scene she inherits from the thought of the Unitarian theologian Joseph Priestley—the solitary intellect meditating silently on the sublimity of the divine—overhangs her work, she moves increasingly beyond it. She experiments with greater degrees of affect in both verse and prose hymns, and the chapter concludes by examining a final Barbauldian understanding of the emotions of prayer as intrinsically social and intersubjective.

Commerce after Money

This chapter addresses the extractive logic of the poet Edward Young. It shows how his late masterpiece Night Thoughts at once extends and complicates the imperialism of his earlier work. At the heart of the analysis is Young’s notion that movement somehow generates depth, so that the mobility of a gold coin produces inner value, immaterial worth ready to be drawn out by its user. The treasure, on Young’s strange view, lies within the gold. Night Thoughts applies this thinking to the spiritual realm. Instead of assuming that it is God who extracts souls from bodies—as workers remove ore from mines—the poem suggests that souls can extract themselves from materiality through religious and poetic inspiration. Then they can delve into the interiorities of other angelic beings and exchange thoughts and feelings with them. Closing the chapter are a comparison to Charles Johnstone’s popular it-narrative Chrysal (1760–5) and a reading of Ignatius Sancho’s gushing praise for Night Thoughts.

Futures of Enlightenment Poetry

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 a coming 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 continue to put it to work.

The Place for Gloom

Beginning the final section of the book, which shows how early Romanticism tames the spiritualist impulse, this chapter considers poetic re-embodiment in relation to psychological depression, called “gloom” by the poet and critic Anna Letitia Barbauld. She faulted Edward Young for having popularized a dangerously gloomy sublimity that, by separating souls from bodies, desensitized readers to subtle and modest everyday feelings. As a remedy, her writing praises the enlightened “chearfulness” of Mark Akenside, a healthy middle register of embodied emotion that is neither too dark nor too bright. Yet Barbauld eventually came to agree, the chapter argues, with medical experts who had decided that melancholy is an affliction more of matter than mind. Late poems, crowned by Eighteen Hundred and Eleven (1812), both accept that gloom belongs in the physical body and identify the poet’s own voice with that body. De-souled and dispirited, Barbauld at last domesticates Young’s otherworldly passion. She makes depression political by making it ordinary.

Gothic and Classical in Eighteenth-Century Criticism

This chapter examines the dynamic and evolving relationship between conceptions of “Gothic” and “classical” in mid-eighteenth-century criticism. It argues that both terms were highly changeable in their content and were rarely imagined as mere opposites. The chapter focuses on three authors, all of whom reinterpreted the classical world as an object of private aesthetic experience rather than as a source of political or ethical examples. In his Conjectures on Original Composition (1759), Edward Young imagines the Roman poets as a giant “spectre,” which threatened to overwhelm modern poets, inhibiting their capacity for original creation. In his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), Edmund Burke describes a frightening descent into the Underworld of Virgil’s Aeneid as an opportunity to form homosocial bonds with other male readers. Finally, Richard Hurd in Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762) describes the classical world as a distant forerunner to a more modern preoccupation with enchantment and imagination. In all three of these authors, the classical world is shifting its meaning and significance. It is becoming, paradoxically, increasingly Gothic.