This perceptive, carefully documented study challenges the traditional assumption that the supernatural virtually disappeared from eighteenth-century poetry as a result of the growing rationalistic temper of the late seventeenth century. Mr. Morris shows that the religious poetry of eighteenth-century England, while not equaling the brilliant work of seventeenth-century and Romantic writers, does reveal a vital and serious effort to create a new kind of sacred poetry which would rival the sublimity of Milton and of the Bible itself.

Tracing the major varieties of religious poetry...