Eternity in British Romantic Poetry explores the representation of the relationship between eternityand the mortal world in the poetry of the period. It offers an original approach to Romanticism thatdemonstrates, against the grain, the dominant intellectual preoccupation of theera: the relationship between the mortal and the eternal. The project's scope is two-fold: firstly, it analyses the prevalence and range ofimages of eternity (from apocalypse and afterlife to transcendence) inRomantic poetry; secondly, it opens up a new and more nuanced focus on howRomantic poets imagined and interacted with the idea of eternity. Every poet featured in the book seeks and finds their uniqueness in their apprehension of eternity. From Blake’s assertion of the Eternal Now toKeats’s defiance of eternity, Wordsworth’s ‘two consciousnesses’ versusColeridge’s capacious poetry, Byron’s swithering between versions of eternitycompared to Shelleyan yearning, and Hemans’s superlative account of everlastingfemale suffering, each poet finds new versions of eternity to explore or reject. This monograph sets out a paradigm-shifting approach to the aesthetic and philosophical power ofeternity in Romantic poetry.
