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perhaps extending to closer study of the popular verse engraved on colonial New England tombstones. Because Hammond is unusually well informed about biblical material and religious history, his treatment should also interest scholars of American religious history and, by virtue of its mentioning material artifacts and social rituals, scholars of American Studies as well. It is therefore regrettable that the hefty price of this
volume will discourage its purchase and circulation beyond library holdings.
John Gatta
University of Connecticut
Apocalypse and Millennium in English Romantic Poetry. By Morton D. Paley.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. ISBN 0-19-818500-6. Pp. viii + 323.
$72.00.

This book investigates the attempt by the each of the six canonical British Romantic poets to envision, primarily with reference to the turbulent history following the
French Revolution, a version of the biblical relationship between apocalypse and millennium-that is, between the cataclysmic end of history as we know it and the subsequent reign of peace either within a new version of history ("millennialism") or outside of history in a state inaugurated by the Second Coming ("millenarianism"). Morton D. Paley begins by discussing the Romantics' apocalyptic and millennial inheritance, including their interest in the prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible and the book
of Revelation, the influence of John Milton's Paradise Lost, and the effect of paleogeologic works such as Thomas Burnet's Theory of the Earth. Late eighteenth-century interpretations of the American and French Revolutions commonly used apocalyptic and
millenniallanguage, demonstrating the close ties between the millennial discourses of
radical politics and radical theology. Apocalypse was easy enough to envision both for
the first generation of Romantics, who experienced the direct aftermath of the French
Revolution during their poetic apprenticeships, and for the second generation, who
experienced the domestic and foreign turmoil that followed the war with France. The
problem was how to envision apocalypse leading to millennium in a world in which
cataclysmic revolutions tended not to follow through on their millennial promises.
William Blake, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, is able to unite apocalypse and
millennium by presenting them as the same thing, the difference between them reflecting
differences in the observer's spiritual condition. This necessarily subordinates history
to imaginative vision in The French Revolution, but history's recalcitrance produces only
a loose relationship between the apocalypse and millennium. Ore's prophecies in
America hold out millennial hopes, but with a sense of "rnillenarial urgency" (62) that
undercuts the possibility of a historical millennium. Ore's ambiguity continues in Europe, leading to apocalypse without millennium. Despite Milton's promises of a millennium that will escape the cycles of history, millennium is realized only in the self.
Curiously, although passing references in other sections of the book acknowledge the
importance (and even the success) of the millennial in Jerusalem, Blake's most complete
epic vision, Paley does not pursue his analysis of Blake to this seemingly logical conclusion.
Paley's last book, Coleridge's Later Poetry (1996), sheds new light on a neglected
period in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's career, and a chapter in the present volume does

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the same for the early, decidedly apocalyptic Coleridge. The poetry of the 1790s, including an early version of "The Destiny of Nations" that Paley exhumes from Coleridge's contribution to Robert Southey's epic Joan ofAre, as well as the more familiar
"Religious Musings," "Ode on the Departing Year,""Fire, Famine, and Slaughter," and
"France: An Ode," presents British aggression toward France as part of a divine historical plan in which apocalypse will lead to a millennium that might be either public or
domestic. Coleridge's disappointments in the French after 1798 reduced the poetic role
of the millennial, forcing the remaining apocalyptic elements into the realm of the grotesque. By the time of Sybil/ine Leaves in 1817, he had abandoned millennialism, and
the events of Revelation provided figurative parallels rather than figural prediction of
contemporary events.
Paley's approach yields its most complex results when the autobiographical Prelude
is chosen to represent William Wordsworth: while apocalypse is addressed elsewhere
in the poet's corpus, this is his most sustained exploration of the relationship between
apocalypse and millennium. The Prelude's visionary moments exhibit an encounter with
an internalized otherness, the crossing of a threshold, and a changing relationship between apocalypse and millennium. This reading is very much in the tradition of Geoffrey Hartman, but with a few twists. The imagination is both an apocalyptic force and
a perceiver of apocalyptic forces as it attempts to translate apocalypse into an internalized millennium. In the account of the poet's experience of the French Revolution in
the 1790s, apocalypse and millennium offer themselves as alternative, mutually displacing structures, and apocalyptic history becomes unreadable. The poet's prophetic power
grows, however, and the poem climaxes with the simultaneous apocalypse and millennium depicted in the ascent of Mount Snowdon. Paley sees this as a blurring rather
than a synthesis of the two, which deprives millennium of social meaning by restricting it to the private. In dealing with such a long poem, one has to be selective, of course,
but Paley's negative conclusion about the Prelude's millennial vision would have been
more convincing had he taken on the remainder of the poem's concluding book, which
at least attempts to make a public example out of the private millennial structure that
Paley critiques.
Lord Byron explores apocalypse throughout his poetry, but the millennial is either
satirized, as in the opening of Don Juan, or presented through nature, as in the later
cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, as a potential that will never be fulfilled. Without
a millennial vision, Byron's ventures into the apocalyptic are of interest primarily as they
connect to the "Last Man" tradition ("Darkness"), or as they demonstrate just how far
apocalypse can be taken without millennium (Cain), or as they simply demonstrate a
failure of the imagination (Heaven and Earth). Percy Shelley provides a more fruitful
arena for Paley's concerns, as his poems seek to link his own radicalism to the previous
generation's radical, millennial concerns. He starts out confidently with Queen Mab, a
rare millennial (not millenarial) poem that looks toward a Godwinian process of human perfectibility. Apocalypse is subordinate to millennium because it is associated with
the cyclical history to be overcome by the millennium. Shelley's "apocapolitical" work,
The Mask ofAnarchy, presents an unsettled relationship between apocalypse and millennium, with apocalypse transforming current events and the millennial imagined as
a future possibility. Paley gives a particularly effective reading of this poem's strange
figuration, seeing the "polarizations of pacifist tenors and violent vehicles" (249), for
example, as expressing the troubled relationship between Shelley's hope for revolution
and his fear of the consequences of violent revolution. Prometheus Unbound, which

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Paleysees as the "most ambitious and least unsuccessful" (275) of the period's attempts
to connect apocalypse and millennium, redefines the relationship between the two in
a vision that can be either millennialist or millenarian, as history offers both millennial
possibilities and a regressive, potentially monstrous cycle that must be overcome.
The book ends with an all-too-brief chapter on John Keats, in which his abandonment of the Hyperion poems is explained in terms of the conflict between Keats's apocalyptic, history-denying frame-narrative, in which the poet experiences the "uncovering" (the etymological meaning of "apocalypse") of Moneta's face, and the need to
portray a millennium within some type of history. Paley's epilogue is a single paragraph
explaining that Keats'sfailure to connect apocalypse and millennium more or less marks
the end of the attempt to do so in nineteenth-century English poetry.
Although one would wish for a more thorough conclusion that explored the implications of Paley's argument, this book makes a major and timely contribution to
Romantic studies. Its strength lies less in its startling new insights than in its reconceptualization of these Romantic texts in terms of a concept that is surprisingly close to
the surface in the poetic, theological, and political discourses of the time but that has
not previously been used as a lens through which to view the traditional Romantic canon. Although Paley draws liberally on the critical tradition, he discovers an historical
synthesis that in some ways reveals a new canon within the already canonical, giving us
a way to discuss, for example, Coleridge's early radicalism, Wordsworth's mature vision,
and Byron's cynicism in the same theoretical context.
What my summary does not reveal is the painstakingly researched and interlinked
historical and textual details that support Paley's readings as he successfully and instructively combines the "old" and the "new" histories of Romanticism. On the one hand,
M. H. Abrams's influential presentation of Romantic thought as a secularized Protestantism is given its full due in a detailed exploration of the poets' secular transformation of biblical texts. On the other hand, the normally antithetical view-that Romanticism is about the quotidian world of politics, not the "ahistorical" realm of naturalized theology-is played out in a detailed exploration of how apocalyptic and millennial discourse informed the poets' responses to contemporary events. As if to emphasize this combination, Paley often cites a source study from the turn of the twentieth
century in the same footnote with a cultural study from the late 1990s.
The troubled relationship between apocalypse and millennium is already multidimensional as a theological concept, and another layer of complexity is added when the
relationship is transferred to political and poetic discourse, so there is no danger here
of turning poetry into ideological allegory. In fact, Paley points out that Keats's Hyperion would have been recognized by contemporaries as carrying a message of political
progress without presenting a specific historical allegory. Coleridge's faith is taken as
seriously as Shelley's atheism, and the link between theology and politics in the poetry
is alwaysan occasion for complication, not simply the familiar "subversion" of theology by history. Political philosophy and aesthetics are both given a hearing: connecting
apocalypse and millennium is a matter of success or (mostly) failure for these poets,
but Paley is careful to distinguish between the kind of failed philosophical endeavor that
produces great poetry and the failure of imagination that produces second-rate work.
David P. Haney
Auburn University