Milton, the metaphysicals, and romanticism

Both the English Civil War and the French Revolution produced in England an outpouring of literature reflecting intense belief in the arrival of a better world, and new philosophies of the relationship between mind, language, and cosmos. Milton, the Metaphysicals, and Romanticism is the first book to explore the significance of the connections between the literature of these two periods. The book analyzes Milton's influence on Romantic writers including Blake, Beckford, Wordsworth, Shelley, Radcliffe, and Keats, and examines the relationships between other seventeenth-century poets - Donne, Marvell, Vaughan, Herrick, Cowley, Rochester, and Dryden - and Romantic writers. Representing a wide range of theoretical approaches, and including original contributions by leading British, American, and Canadian scholars, this is a provocative and challenging assessment of the relationship between two of the richest periods of British literary history.