Eternity in British Romantic Poetry explores the representation of the relationship between eternity
and the mortal world in the poetry of the period. It offers an original approach to Romanticism that
demonstrates, against the grain, the dominant intellectual preoccupation of the
era: the relationship between the mortal and the eternal. The project's scope is two-fold: firstly, it analyses the prevalence and range of
images of eternity (from apocalypse and afterlife to transcendence) in
Romantic poetry; secondly, it opens up a new and more nuanced focus on how
Romantic 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 to
Keats’s defiance of eternity, Wordsworth’s ‘two consciousnesses’ versus
Coleridge’s capacious poetry, Byron’s swithering between versions of eternity
compared to Shelleyan yearning, and Hemans’s superlative account of everlasting
female 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 of
eternity in Romantic poetry.