Secular Chains

Abstract

Secular Chains provides an original account of the relationship between poetry and religious controversy in the period 1649–1745, with a particular emphasis on political and intellectual challenges to the spiritual and institutional authority of the church. It contains extended readings of a number of major poets, including Milton, Dryden, Thomson, and Pope, alongside detailed consideration of the broader historical contexts within which they wrote. Those contexts extend to prose writings by political and literary figures including James Harrington, John Toland, John Dennis, and the third earl of Shaftesbury. Part I is devoted to the divisive place of religion in the republican moment of the 1650s, together with the influence of this issue on the poetry of John Milton. Part II reassesses the significance of the Restoration church settlement—and the culture of nonconformity—for our understanding of Dryden and Milton after 1660. Part III extends the book’s argument into the early Enlightenment world of the eighteenth century, including chapters on the connections between whig poetics and free-thinking religious radicalism; the political meanings of Newtonian natural theology in the work of James Thomson; and the religious identity of Alexander Pope.

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