Table of Contents:
  • Introduction: Grace under pressure
  • Approaching the unapproached light: Milton and the Romantic visionary
  • Cowper prospects: self, nature, society
  • 'Je sais bien, mais quand m^me': Wordsworth's faithful scepticism
  • Catholic contagion: Southey, Coleridge and English Romantic anxieties
  • 'Sacrifice and offering thou didst not desire'
  • 'I was bred a moderate Presbyterian', Christine
  • Byron's confessional pilgrimage
  • Words and the word: the diction of Don Juan, Richard Cronin
  • 'Why should I speak?'
  • Byron's monk-y business: ghostly closure and comic continuity
  • 'A fine excess': Hopkins, Keats, and the gratuity of grace
  • 'Until death tramples it to tragments'
  • Sacred art and profane poets
  • 'The death of satan': Stevens's 'Esth,tique du mal', evil, and the Romantic imagination
  • Bibliography
  • Index