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Elations rewrites the history of early-eighteenth-century English literature around the politics and poetics of "Enthusiasm." It examines the aesthetic theory of the period and reassesses the poetry of two poets seldom read today but very popular in their time: James Thomson and Edward Young. The book also explores the genesis and construction of moral authority through a variety of competing discourses appropriated by poetry, and it traces the rehabilitation of languages of sentiment and Enthusiasm between the English Civil War and the American Revolution. Today, most readers still associate poetry with the expression of emotion; indeed, Wordsworth's phrase "spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling" resounds in contemporary conceptions of poetry. But the position of sentiment in poetry was not always so secure, as attested by the largely forgotten intellectual struggles that produced Romanticism. To understand the etymology of sentiment in eighteenth-century English poetry, the author argues, we must begin by studying religious enthusiasm in the seventeenth century. The literary fortunes of Enthusiasm provide a central clue to the changing terms in which moral subjectivity and pol

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