Elations: The Poetics of Enthusiasm in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Shaun Irlam's primary goal in this ambitious book, which is an expanded version of his dissertation, is to trace the transformation-or devolution-of a British rhetoric of enthusiasm from seventeenth-century religious usage to eighteenth-century critical and poetic practices. According to Irlam, the rhetoric of religious zeal becomes "poetic Enthusiasm," an imaginative transport of emotional intensity that fosters and proves certain moral capacities (7). Thus, this rhetoric prepares the way for a discourse of sensibility in which the expression of sentiment is a mark of successful transcendence.

The book is divided into two parts. In the first part, Irlam explores "the seventeenth-century social and political contexts" that determine definitions of sentiment following the Civil War. He then gives a selective overview of some aesthetic theories of the early eighteenth century that follow from these contexts. In the second part, Irlam examines "the new bearings poetry took as a consequence of the rehabilitation of sentiment, and enthusiastic sentiment in particular, in aesthetic theory" (2). To show what results from the "gradual rehabilitation and aestheticization" of "Enthusiasm . . . as poetic energy" in the eighteenth century, Irlam presents James Thomson's The Seasons (1726-46) and Edward Young's Night Thought (1742-46) as case studies.

Found throughout both parts of the book, implicitly and explicitly, is a concern for Biblical hermeneutics that established a "paradigm for figural and interpretive practices" inherited and reshaped by a poetics of enthusiasm. Irlam asserts that two traditional Biblical, rhetorical practices provide central patterns for the poetry of transport and revelation, that of typology and the conversion narrative. In both practices, there is a gap between sign and referent; this gap is precisely the point of focus in exegesis. Typological reading, which eventually provides one "paradigm for figural and interpretive practices" in eighteenth-century poetics, dictates that the full meaning of a sign can be found only in a later event that is interpreted as the first event's completion (235). Therefore, an event in the Old Testament is not understood as having adequate meaning by itself. Instead, an event points towards its fulfillment in subsequent events described in the New Testament; the interpreter uses the events in both time periods as evidence of divine intention as he reads meaning backwards after revelation.

Similarly, the pattern of the conversion narrative suggests that a life is improperly or incompletely understood until an "epiphanic insight" casts new light into previous meanings and provokes transformation (15). Therefore, the conversion narrative provides one account of unmaking and then remaking the subject through a process of self-alienation and reintegration (1-2). As a result of this process, speakers who claimed to have undergone conversion could also assert a powerful authority based in divine revelation. One secular version of such authority becomes the genius, that creative figure so central to aesthetic declarations of the mid-century, such as Edward Young's Conjectures on Original Composition. The genius will become increasingly solitary as a hallmark of his transformation.

Irlam links these rhetorical practices of typology and conversion narrative to early and mid-eighteenth-century poetics as found in Thomson's and Young's verse. In addition, Irlam argues that these poems reveal some of the new directions British poetry took at mid-century as a result of aesthetic theory increasingly supported by an enthusiastic sentiment. Irlam usefully analyzes the poems according to recurring topoi that constitute "the idioms of Enthusiasm" (1), such as the book of Nature as evidence of God's presence. Irlam presents The Seasons as the result of "an awkward coexistence of secular and providential temporalities"; such coexistence explains the often odd conjunction of empirically-precise, particular descriptions with pronouncements made from an "epiphanic standpoint" (116, 119). His reading of Night Thoughts establishes a similar conjunction of earthly time, painfully felt as it passes away, with immortality that replaces the initial significance of mortal time. In explicating these juxtapositions of temporality, Irlam is particularly astute in his descriptions of the related conflations of time and space that Young creates to dizzying effect. Through this analysis of these rhetorical practices and topoi, Thomson's and Young's stress on unmaking our customary understanding of the world in order to gain transformed insight becomes far more intelligible.

Certainly Irlam is at his best as a reader when he traces the appearance and often perplexing intellectual contexts of such topoi in various passages by Thomson and by Young. Besides, it is a great pleasure to see theological issues respectfully treated in a work of literary criticism. More attention could have been paid, however, to formal elements that contribute to the varied tones of The Seasons and to the insistent "ejaculatory sublime" of Night Thoughts. Irlam's readings never make entirely clear how these texts might be important as poems except as they reiterate items from "an eighteenth-century image reservoir" determined in part by a rhetoric of enthusiasm (81). Furthermore, no matter how monumental these two poems may be as case studies, consideration of a larger set of poetic examples-such as poetry by the Wartons-could have strengthened the book's claim to rewrite a literary history of the eighteenth century.

Elations considers an astonishing range of aesthetic and rhetorical topics through associations and "linkages between theoretically and aesthetically cognate issues." Irlam asserts that the "sprawling, diffuse quality" of criticism that tackles the "perennially untidy" texts, those declared to constitute the discourse of sensibility, regularly enacts its subject, and that his book is no different (3). In fact, the poems by Thomson and Young may be less conspicuously formless than Irlam claims, even though this is, of course, the standard account of their monumental, apparently ungainly structure. Irlam's discussion is not always as integrated as one might like, but his resistance against any single explanation for the complex textual and cultural phenomena he describes is admirable. In the chapters on early eighteenth-century criticism by John Dennis and Joseph Addison and their reliance on definitions of passion and the sublime, Irlam does well to set out the traces of religious discourse circulating in these influential, critical pronouncements. One wonders, however, exactly how to judge what is strictly "secular, literary affect" (236), given how overtly religious all of the critical and poetic texts under consideration are. Nevertheless, the intentionally authoritative, moral poems of mid-eighteenth-century England, through which "poetic, affective, and, ultimately, moral subjects"(2) are meant to be constructed, become more intelligible with Irlam's observations in mind.

One could wish that Elations were grounded in a more comprehensive history of enthusiasm and its possible expressions. Certainly, Irlam deftly uses Clement Hawes' recent book on the rhetoric of enthusiasm. But studies not necessarily located primarily in literary criticism-such as Michael Heyd's Be Sober and Reasonable: The Critique of Enthusiasm in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries (1995)-could have been helpful in establishing the historical contexts for certain rhetorical practices and resulting critiques of enthusiastic practices. Heyd and others have argued that reactions to enthusiasm constituted one contribution toward a progressive secularization in the early modern period. With this work in mind, Irlam's description of a shift from a religious to a secular aesthetics could be understood as part of a series of related shifts supposedly precipitated by reactions to enthusiasm.

Critics and students alike have frequently been incredulous at how popular the long poems of Thomson and Young were. By placing these poets and some of the criticism they relied upon in the context of an evolving tradition of enthusiastic expression, Irlam explains their importance and the complexities created from this particular discourse. This is, therefore, a useful book.