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M.H. Abrams Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1971.

     Abrams's study examines the circulation of theological language in Romantic poetry and philosophy, both in England and in Germany, with a particular focus on the imagery of the apocalypse in chapters one and six.

      In his first chapter, "This is Our High Argument," Abrams begins by examining Wordsworth's program for poetry, culminating in imagery of the apocalyptic marriage. He posits that Wordsworth's use of the apocalyptic imagery was not exclusive (he also examines the way this imagery is employed by Blake, Shelley, Coleridge, and Southey) and that scholars have not paid adequate attention to this use of religion. He gives significant historical background to the Christian apocalypse and the development of early theologians on the millennium, culminating in a detailed description of the Revelation of St. John (40-41). Abrams defines apocalyptic discourse in the Romantic period as revolving around two central images: the marriage of Christ with Jerusalem, and the coming of the New Heaven and the New Earth; he further limits his study by confining it to the theological sense of the apocalypse as "a vision in which the old world is replaced by a new and better world" rather than the more loose sense of mass violence and destruction. In the section entitled "Christian History and Psychobiography," Abrams argues that as time progressed and the many different projections of the end of the world passed, theologians began to interpret the apocalypse on an individual level. In "Alternative Ways to the Millennium: Progress and Revolution" Abrams relates Enlightenment ideals of advancement and progress to a Christian discourse already focused on "an inevitable future of absolute moral and material well-being on earth" (59) and traces the development of a historical thinking that predicted a total revolution that would eradicate the evils of humanity (62-63).

     In Chapter Six, "Revelation, Revolution, Imagination, and Cognition," Abrams develops the ideas put forth in the last section of chapter one, examining the reaction of the Romantic writers to the extremes of hope and failure arising from the French Revolution. The timeline of faith in a literal enactment of biblical prophecy shifted onto the individual believer that Abrams outlines in chapter one becomes his dominant model for the transition from explicit support for revolutionary causes that mark the early Romantic works to the visions of perceptual revolution that distinguish the later works of Blake, Coleridge, Shelley, and Wordsworth.


Excerpts


From Chapter One:
The assimilation of Biblical and theological elements to secular or pagan frames of reference began with the establishment of Christianity, and it was immensely accelerated from the Renaissance through the eighteenth century. What is exceptional in the period beginning in the 1790s is the scope of this undertaking and the deliberateness with which it was often carried on. A conspicuous Romantic tendency, after the rationalism and decorum of the Enlightenment, was a reversion to the stark drama and suprarational mysteries of the Christian story and doctrines and to the violent conflicts and abrupt reversals of the Christian inner life, turning on the extremes of destitution, joy, paradise lost and paradise regained. . . .But since they lived, inescapably, after the Enlightenment, Romantic writers revived these ancient matters with a difference: they undertook to save the overview of human history and destiny; the experiential paradigm, and the cardinal values of their religious heritage, by reconstituting them in a way that would make them intellectually acceptable, as well as emotionally pertinent for the time being. (62-63)

From Chapter Six:

In the folklore which has accumulated around Romantic literature, it has been a frequent claim that Romantic writers evaded the political and social crises of their era by ignoring them, or by escaping into a fantasy world. Wordsworth in fact insisted, with only moderate exaggeration, that he "had given twelve hours thought to the conditions and prospects of society, for one to poetry," and he, together with most of his fellow poets, delivered himself of direct commentary and exhortations on the great affairs of his day, both in prose and in verse. Moreover, many of the major philosophical and imaginative works are permeated with political and social issues; what obscures this fact is that these issues are often submerged, manifesting their presence only by indirection and allusion. A striking example is the degree to which the key concepts in the political theories of the Enlightenment, together with the events and ideals of the French Revolution--equality, fraternity, and above all liberty--are transposed into nonpolitical areas, as metaphors of mind which pervade the discussion of perception, intellection, and imagination. (357)