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Abstract
This dissertation situates the poetry of Edward Young and William Blake in a common tradition of eighteenth-century devotional poetry and its neglected involvement in the political history of the long eighteenth century. Devotional poetry will be shown to be an indispensable channel connecting discourses of English radicalism between the Civil War and French Revolution. Beginning with Dissenters of the Restoration era, a host of writers and readers throughout this period made a radical equation of religion and art, which rejected emerging distinctions between religious and literary practices. Literary texts with religious significance challenged the assumptions of polite literary culture, Anglican ecclesiology, and Enlightenment epistemologies.
Young is shown to be a vital component in the line of devotional radicalism and a seminal influence on Blake's religious aesthetic. I explore how devotional poetry circulated in plebeian and evangelical print culture, and I reveal how the equation of religion and art made by Blake and Young related to Dissenting and radical politics. In the first chapter, I examine the critical history that has set Young and Blake in opposition. My second chapter describes the formation of radical devotional poetics in the works of Richard Blackmore, John Dennis, Elizabeth Singer Rowe, and Isaac Watts. I explore how these writers combined new theories of sublimity with traditional devotional practices after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and how this aesthetic was driven from the genteel public sphere by new conceptions of devotion and poetry. In the third chapter, I show how Young's early poetry participated in the political controversies of the period and how he transformed the aesthetic of his predecessors by emphasizing its devotional qualities. The fourth chapter examines the evangelical and counter-Enlightenment arguments of Young's Night Thoughts and explores the poem's connections with the Great Awakening. My fifth chapter considers Young's impact on devotional radicalism and sectarian print culture in Blake's early works, An Island in the Moon and Poetical Sketches. The sixth chapter connects Young's work in the 1750s to Blake's early tractates through a political genealogy surrounding ecclesiastical reform and efforts to repeal the Test and Corporation Acts.
