Timing the Apocalypse: The Career of Religious Musings

Abstract

Coleridge’s early poem Religious Musings is normally taken to illustrate the apocalypticism that appeared in British radical discourse with the outbreak of the French Revolution. In this essay I try to reassess the poem’s apocalyptic commitments. Rather than simply exhibiting apocalyptic tendencies that were common in radical circles, Religious Musings presents a critique of revolutionary apocalypticism. This critiques is visible first of all in the alternative forms of temporal experience that Coleridge clusters alongside the poem’s announcement of the coming apocalypse: the presence of the desultory and of the life in time experienced by the elect unsettles the poem’s apparent apocalypticism. In the end, Religious Musings finds value in temporality: for Coleridge, even at this early stage in his career, events find their primary significance in relation to time. I also suggest that this commitment to temporality should not be read as a loss of hope for political change; rather, by recognizing the constraints that time and history place upon political actors, Coleridge means to salvage the possibility of liberal politics. I conclude the essay by examining the role that Religious Musings plays in Coleridge’s 1796 collection, where it appears as the final poem. Religious Musings provides in its emphasis on temporality a model for organizing and thereby validating the diversity of genres, emotions, and ideas that marks Coleridge’s first book of poetry.

Notes

[1] Letters 1: 137, December 1794. See also Coleridge to Thelwall, 17 December 1796, where the poet acknowledges some “garishness and swell of diction” in his poetry. Coleridge’s letter to Cottle, c. 10 February 1797 also contains some criticism of Religious Musings (1: 309).

[2] For Coleridge’s view that his “poetic credit” will be determined by Religious Musings see, for example, the letters of April 1796 to Benjamin Flowers and to Thomas Poole (1: 197, 203).

[3] Ian Wylie, who offers a thorough reading of the poem in relation to Enlightenment science, provides an example: “If not a great or integrated poem, [ Religious Musings] was a working draft of Coleridge’s thoughts during an extremely important year of his life” (95).

[4] Coleridge, Preface to Poems on various subjects (1796), ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, v, emphasis added. All references to the Preface are to this edition; all other references to Coleridge’s poetry are from John Beer’s edition, which reproduces Poems on Various Subjects as it first appeared in April of 1796.

[5] This emphasis also appears in the subtitle’s allusion to a precise date of composition, 25 December 1794.

[6] This position applies to temporal experience what some recent scholars have seen as Coleridge’s tendency to orchestrate rather than resolve contradictory ideas. Mark Canuel, for example, has argued persuasively that Coleridge’s religious writings are designed to provide a “capacious organization of belief” (953) rather than to advocate particular religious truths to the exclusion of others. For the most comprehensive example of this perspective, see Seamus Perry, Coleridge and the Uses of Division (1999).

[7] Paley finds this mode in poems such as “Fire, Famine, and Slaughter,” and “The Devil’s Thoughts.”

[8] Internal quotations are from Oliver, 129.

[9] Paley quotes here from Tuveson, 34. Peter Kitson, as we’ll see below, uses the distinction between millenarianism and millennialism as the foundation for his reading of the poem.

[10] He dates this initial millenarian period as 1794–97 (62). According to Kitson, Coleridge’s transition models Milton’s career, as the earlier poet traded in his fiery millenarianism of the early tracts for the quiet millennialism of Paradise Lost.

[11] We should note that Priestley’s position in the Gravel Pit sermon doesn’t square with many of his other ideas about time and history, particularly his endorsement of Hartley, an Enlightenment gradualist who had a major influence on Coleridge’s thought about temporal experience. Nonetheless, Priestley’s taste for millenarianism appears frequently, even predating the French Revolution. Isaac Kramnick compiles some useful passages: “Those times of revived antiquity have had their use and are now no more …. Their maxims of life will not suit the world as it is at present” ( Lectures on History and General Policy, 1782, qtd. in Kramnick 3n.). This clearly registers Priestley’s impatience with the notion of a debt to the past. In 1785 ( Reflections on the Present State of Government) Priestley claimed to be “as it were, laying gunpowder, grain by grain, under the old building of error and superstition, [which] may be overturned in a moment and so effectively as that same foundation can never be built again” (qtd in Kramnick 12).

[12] The training of the elect is also fully compatible with Godwin’s version of gradualism, which was notoriously inserted into the second edition of Political Justice in 1795. “Truth, however unreserved be the mode of enunciation, will be sufficiently gradual in its progress. It will be fully comprehended only by slow degrees by its most assiduous votaries” (251). For Godwin, time is a measure of education to truth, not of its production.

[13] Wylie points out Coleridge’s distinction between “eloquent men,” who will incite the storm of revolution, and the elect, who will afterwards emerge to shape the new world (79).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

John Axcelson

John Axcelson is an assistant dean in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Columbia University, where he also teaches in the English Department.