Shaun Irlam. Elations: the Poetics of Enthusiasm in Eighteenth-Century Britain.

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-MAR-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 Boston University

Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Pp. 284. $51.00.

Much mid-eighteenth-century English poetry--after Pope, before Wordsworth, unlike both--challenges postmodern readers to the point of frustration. Gray's Elegy and Collins' odes hold enough in common with their romantic successors to make them still legible, but long, miscellaneous poems like James Thomson's The Seasons (1726-1746) and Edward Young's Night Thoughts (1742-1745) operate on baffling premises and create baffling effects. Even sophisticated and conscientious readers often tacitly declare them not worth the trouble.

The consequent critical neglect of such writers as Young and Thomson has now been at least in part remedied by Shaun Irlam's ambitious study, which sets out both to read and to account for Thomson and Young in up-to-date critical terms. Irlam brings an imaginative historical perspective to bear on his subjects, contextualizing their achievement through detailed examination of contemporaneous critical and philosophic discourse. He not only provides ways to take seriously these largely forgotten poets; he also adumbrates certain pleasures of reading them.

As his title suggests,...

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