The Poetic Enlightenment

The essays in this edited collection look at the role of poetry in the development of Enlightenment ideas. As scholarly disciplines began to emerge – anthropology, linguistics, psychology – the ancient art of poetry was invoked to create new ways of defining and expanding this philosophy of human science.

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.

THE POETRY OF ENLIGHTENMENT contains translations and commentaries of ancient Chinese Ch'an (Zen) masters poems. The poems provide guidance for all students of meditation.

John Keats is generally considered to be the least intellectually sophisticated of all the major Romantic poets, but he was a more serious thinker than either his contemporaries or later scholars have acknowledged. This book provides a major reassessment of Keats's intellectual life by considering his engagement with a formidable body of eighteenth-century thought from the work of Voltaire, Robertson, and Gibbon to Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith.The book re-examines some of Keats's most important poems, including The Eve of St Agnes, Hyperion, Lamia, and Ode to Psyche, in the light of a range of Enlightenment ideas and contexts from literary history and cultural progress to anthropology, political economy, and moral philosophy. By demonstrating that the language and ideas of the Enlightenment played a key role in establishing his poetic agenda, Keats's poetry is shown to be less the expression of an intuitive young genius than the product of the cultural and intellectual contexts of his time.

What warranted the skewering of Richard Bentley (whom Rhodri Lewis called “perhaps the most notable—and notorious—scholar ever to have English as a mother tongue”) by two of the literary giants of his day? Kristine Haugen offers a fascinating portrait of Europe’s most infamous classical scholar and the intellectual turmoil he set in motion.

This collection of twelve critical essays on women's poetry of the eighteenth century and enlightenment is the first to range widely over individual poets and to undertake a comprehensive exploration of their work. Experiment with genre and form, the poetics of the body, the politics of gender, revolutionary critique, and patronage, are themes of the collection, which includes discussions of the distinctive projects of Mary Leapor, Ann Yearsley, Helen Maria Williams, Joanna Baillie, Charlotte Smith, Anna Barbauld and Lucy Aikin.

By examining nearly sixty works, the author traces the prehistory of the French prose poem, demonstrating that the disquiet of some eighteenth-century writers with the Enlightenment gave rise to the genre nearly a century before it is habitually supposed to have existed. In the throes of momentous scientific, philosophical, and socioeconomic changes, Enlightenment authors turned to the past to revive sources such as Homer, the pastoral, Ossian, the Bible, and primitive eloquence, favoring music to construct alternatives to the world of reason. The result, the author argues, were prose poems, including F lon's Les Adventures de T maque, Montesquieu's Le Temple de Gnide, Rousseau's Le L te d'Ephraïm, Chateaubriand's Atala, as well as many lesser-known texts, most of which remain out of print. The author's treatment of Bible criticism and eighteenth-century religious reform movements reveal the often-neglected spiritual side of Enlightenment culture, and tracks its contribution to the period's reflection about language and poetic invention. The author includes in appendices four unusual texts adjudicating the merits of prose poems, making evidence of their controversial nature now accessible to readers.

For the masters of the Chan tradition, poetry was a form of creative expression, but even more than that, it was a primary vehicle for teaching. Here a modern master presents ten teaching poems from the ancient masters, with illuminating commentary. “These poems flow directly from the minds of the enlightened Chan masters,” Master Sheng Yen says. “We get a glimpse into their experience at the time of, and after, their enlightenment. It is my hope that this collection of poems will give those who are interested in the practice a new way of looking at Chan.”