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Copyright by Dustin Donahue Stewart 2013 The Dissertation Committee for Dustin Donahue Stewart certifies that this is approved version of the following dissertation: Exponential Futures: Whig Poetry and Religious Imagination, 1670-1745 Committee: Lance Bertelsen, Co-Supervisor John Rumrich, Co-Supervisor Lisa Moore James Garrison Kristine Haugen Nigel Smith Exponential Futures: Whig Poetry and Religious Imagination, 1670-1745 by Dustin Donahue Stewart, B.A.; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2013 Epigraph To really live, we should be dead too. Isn’t all our dread a dread of being Just here? of being only this? Of having no other thing to become? Of having nowhere to go really But where we are? What power has the sun If it must remain the sun? We are afraid that one day the hand Will not catch us when we come; That the remorseless fingers will not close over us. And I think that is our strongest will— The reason all our dreams of paradise Are dreams of an unlimited disorder In a lawless anonymity. — Kenneth Patchen, “Credit to Paradise” Acknowledgements This project began to take shape in seminars taught by Lance Bertelsen and John Rumrich. It was my good fortune that later on they agreed to serve as my co-supervisors. Lance and John—each in his own way—helped me to make my claims not just clearer, more precise, and better supported, but more truly my own. I can only hope that their influence shines through on every page. But I can confidently say that each page represents a measure of my thanks to them. I’m thankful too for the steadying encouragement and the intellectual energy supplied by other mentors at the University of Texas at Austin: Lisa Moore, Jim Garrison, Janine Barchas, Andy Cooper, and Sam Baker. Special thanks go to Wayne Lesser, who believed in my work before I could articulate anything cogent to believe in. Fellowships awarded by the Department of English and the Graduate School gave me necessary time to research, write, and revise the dissertation. I’m especially proud to have held the Powers Graduate Fellowship, named in honor of William Powers Jr., president of the university. I happily acknowledge the support I received from research libraries in Austin and in London. Without guidance from diligent librarians at the Harry Ransom Center, the British Library, and Dr. Williams’s Library, I might still be flailing. Jason Leubner and Louisa Hall were invaluable partners in a writing group: if only every author could write for such readers. Other friends and colleagues kindly read or talked me through parts of my argument, among them Meghan Andrews, Pearl Brilmyer, Matt Gertken, Dave Harper, Hala Herbly, Stephanie Rosen, and Connie Steel. Without Rachel Schneider’s unflagging dedication, my commitment to this project would’ve been much diminished, my hopes for its usefulness would’ve been deflated, and my dissertation defense would’ve remained unscheduled. I’m glad to have the opportunity to thank my parents, Gwen and Buck Stewart, who somehow v guessed that my scattershot reading would take me somewhere worth going, and whose support (particularly during my years in Austin) helped to get me there. Finally, I thank my wife, Emily Bloom, shepherd and sharpener of my best thoughts. I take boundless joy in imagining all the futures we can realize together. vi Exponential Futures: Whig Poetry and Religious Imagination, 1670-1745 Dustin Donahue Stewart, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2013 Supervisors: Lance Bertelsen and John Rumrich My dissertation argues that the eighteenth-century Whig writers Elizabeth Singer Rowe, Edward Young, and Mark Akenside remake poetic futurity as they repudiate materialism. Against materialist thinkers who held that souls don’t exist or are inseparable from bodies, the poetry of these English authors sings the freedom of the immortal soul. They far outstrip conventional apologetics, however, by imagining that the soul leaps out of the human body and into new angelic powers. The result is a claim about time: that the soul can separate from the body means for these poets that the future can break from the present. Yet they won’t be patient for newness to come. Reshaping the discourse of enthusiasm, with its promise of ready access to the divine, they also insist that the separated soul’s expansive potential can be claimed for present use. Their verse means to pull futurity’s changes to the present, making available endless possibilities in advance. These writers accordingly complicate familiar scholarly narratives that portray English poetry and theology of their era as oriented to the past. Rowe, Young, and Akenside instead propel souls forward and outward. Their heady visions reflect the Whig writers’ political leanings and their calls for a modern English literary canon that transcends neoclassical values. Although they name Milton as their model and take up his forms and images, they rebrand their hero to conform him to their agenda. The vii mortalist Milton holds that the souls of the dead can’t persist without bodies: they must wait for a miraculous resurrection to return to consciousness and then God. By refitting Milton’s poetic style to support an attack on materialism, his self-proclaimed successors rein in one aspect of his radical thought even as they amplify a different aspect. In their poems, inspired spirits needn’t stand by for the end of time to be divinized. They already launch into new worlds, communing with other angelic intelligences and exulting in otherworldly passions. The Whig writers offer a far-reaching but surprisingly understudied defense of the poetry they reinvent. They declare that modern religious verse can allow poets and readers to raid the riches of an angelic future. viii Table of Contents List of Figures ........................................................................................................................ xi Introduction: Contested Futurities ..................................................................................... 1 Bodily Futures: Mortalism, Socinianism, and Materialism ..................................... 5 Claims for the Soul’s Detachment: Regulation and New Freedom ................... 20 Patterns of Ascent ...................................................................................................... 30 Chapter One: Socinian Time and the God-Man’s Forms in Paradise Regain’d ................................................................................................................. 37 A Coincidence of Forms ........................................................................................... 44 God-Men against the Socinians ............................................................................... 53 Biddle’s Temporality and the Brief Epic’s Hero ................................................... 62 (a) Identity and Education .............................................................................. 66 (b) New Creation ............................................................................................. 74 (c) God’s Form in Time .................................................................................. 82 Conclusion .................................................................................................................. 93 Chapter Two: Rowe, Angels, and Acceleration .............................................................. 98 Singing the Soul’s Bondage..................................................................................... 107 (a) The Devotional Poet in Poems on Several Occasions ................................ 108 (b) The Libertine in A Collection of Divine Hymns and Poems ...................... 113 “Launching Out into the Other”: Release and Return ....................................... 130 Conclusion ................................................................................................................ 146 ix Chapter Three: Growth for Time in Young’s Night Thoughts ..................................... 148 The Structure of Expansion ................................................................................... 157 New Creations and Changes of Scale ................................................................... 174 (a) “All the Sons of Reason” ........................................................................ 176 (b) “From Some Superior Point” ................................................................ 183 The Gratifications of Deferral ............................................................................... 194 Conclusion ................................................................................................................ 205 Chapter Four: Akenside’s Ascent to Difference .......................................................... 209 Principles of Proliferation ....................................................................................... 218 Lingering Enchantment .......................................................................................... 234 (a) Dreams of Matter ..................................................................................... 237 (b) Spectacles of Education .......................................................................... 243 The Inspired Poet Unbound .................................................................................. 253 Conclusion
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