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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 re­ligioushistory 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 thisvolume will discourage its purchase and circulation beyond library holdings.

John GattaUniversity ofConnecticut

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 theFrench 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 bookof 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 andmillenniallanguage, demonstrating the close ties between the millennial discourses ofradical politics and radical theology. Apocalypse was easy enough to envision both forthe first generation of Romantics, who experienced the direct aftermath of the FrenchRevolution during their poetic apprenticeships, and for the second generation, whoexperienced the domestic and foreign turmoil that followed the war with France. Theproblem was how to envision apocalypse leading to millennium in a world in whichcataclysmic revolutions tended not to follow through on their millennial promises.

William Blake, in The Marriage ofHeaven and Hell, is able to unite apocalypse andmillennium by presenting them as the same thing, the difference between them reflectingdifferences in the observer's spiritual condition. This necessarily subordinates historyto imaginative vision in The French Revolution, but history's recalcitrance produces onlya loose relationship between the apocalypse and millennium. Ore's prophecies inAmerica hold out millennial hopes, but with a sense of "rnillenarial urgency" (62) thatundercuts 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 theimportance (and even the success) of the millennial in Jerusalem, Blake'smost completeepic 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 neglectedperiod 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 ordomestic. Coleridge's disappointments in the French after 1798 reduced the poetic roleof 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, andthe events of Revelation provided figurative parallels rather than figural prediction ofcontemporary events.

Paley's approach yields its most complex results when the autobiographical Preludeis chosen to represent William Wordsworth: while apocalypse is addressed elsewherein the poet's corpus, this is his most sustained exploration of the relationship betweenapocalypse and millennium. The Prelude's visionary moments exhibit an encounter withan 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 anda 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 inthe 1790s, apocalypse and millennium offer themselves as alternative, mutually displac­ing structures, and apocalyptic history becomes unreadable. The poet's prophetic powergrows, however, and the poem climaxes with the simultaneous apocalypse and millen­nium depicted in the ascent of Mount Snowdon. Paley sees this as a blurring ratherthan 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 beenmore convincing had he taken on the remainder of the poem's concluding book, whichat least attempts to make a public example out of the private millennial structure thatPaley critiques.

Lord Byron explores apocalypse throughout his poetry, but the millennial is eithersatirized, as in the opening of Don Juan, or presented through nature, as in the latercantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, as a potential that will never be fulfilled. Withouta millennial vision, Byron's ventures into the apocalyptic are of interest primarily as theyconnect to the "Last Man" tradition ("Darkness"), or as they demonstrate just how farapocalypse can be taken without millennium (Cain), or as they simply demonstrate afailure of the imagination (Heaven and Earth). Percy Shelley provides a more fruitfularena for Paley's concerns, as his poems seek to link his own radicalism to the previousgeneration's radical, millennial concerns. He starts out confidently with Queen Mab, arare millennial (not millenarial) poem that looks toward a Godwinian process of hu­man perfectibility. Apocalypse is subordinate to millennium because it is associated withthe 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 asa future possibility. Paley gives a particularly effective reading of this poem's strangefiguration, seeing the "polarizations of pacifist tenors and violent vehicles" (249), forexample, as expressing the troubled relationship between Shelley's hope for revolutionand 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 attemptsto connect apocalypse and millennium, redefines the relationship between the two ina vision that can be either millennialist or millenarian, as history offers both millennialpossibilities 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 toportray a millennium within some type of history. Paley'sepilogue isa single paragraphexplaining that Keats'sfailure to connect apocalypse and millennium more or lessmarksthe 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 toRomantic 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 tothe surface in the poetic, theological, and political discourses of the time but that hasnot 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 historicalsynthesis that in some ways reveals a new canon within the already canonical, giving usa 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 interlinkedhistorical 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 ofbiblical 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 twentiethcentury 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 therelationship is transferred to political and poetic discourse, so there is no danger hereof 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 politicalprogress without presenting a specific historical allegory. Coleridge's faith is taken asseriously as Shelley's atheism, and the link between theology and politics in the poetryisalwaysan occasion for complication, not simply the familiar "subversion" of theolo­gyby history. Political philosophy and aesthetics are both given a hearing: connectingapocalypse and millennium is a matter of success or (mostly) failure for these poets,but Paley iscareful to distinguish between the kind of failed philosophical endeavor thatproduces great poetry and the failure of imagination that produces second-rate work.

David P. HaneyAuburn University