Apocalypse and Millennium in English Romantic Poetry [Paperback]

The interrelationship of apocalypse and millennium is a dominant concern in British Romanticism. The Book of Revelation provides a model of history in which apocalypse is followed by millennium, but the major Romantic poets question the possibility of a successful secularization of this model. Is history developing towards end time and millennium, or is it cyclical and purposeless?

Introduction
Blake
Coleridge
Wordsworth
Byron
Shelley
Keats
Bibliography
Index

This book excels by its sound scholarship, lucid style, and exact argumentation. --Religion and the Arts

The overall process indicated in professor Paley's study, by which the imaginary of Revelation dissolved over a few years from an organized biblical pattern of the understanding of current events to a range of images for less coherent subsequent interpretations emerges as a fascinating phenomenon, for which he has provided the first-- and definitive--guide. --Notes and Queries

There is much that is familiar in these analyses, yet much that is new, subtle, and unsettling. It provides an admirable example of what careful schlarship, untainted by tendentious purposes, can unveil both in the poems and in previous schemes of their interpretation....Paley has encyclopedic knowledge of the particulars of literary and political history; and he has imagination to arrange them in revealing patterns. Anyone interested in the historical location of these works, in their responsivenes to and echoes of the discourses of their day, and in their answerability must mine this book. --The Wordsworth Circle

An informative introductory overview setting out biblical sources of apocalypse and millennium, seventeenth-century millenarianism in the English Revolution, catastrophist theory in writers like Thomas Burnet, and the gathering millennial excitement among eighteenth-century Illuminati and the Swedenborgians...Paley reveals forlc{