“To Milton’s Trump”: Coleridge’s Unitarian Sublime and the Miltonic Apocalypse

Abstract

Much recent criticism of the reformist and dissenting politics of the 1790s has stressed the fact that radical writers attempted to manufacture a transparent prose style in which to propagate political ideas.¹ It is generally argued that this was in reaction against Edmund Burke’s use of a rhetoric of the sublime and his appropriation of the mode of sensibility (the latter until then a discourse associated with progressive and reformist ideas).² Writers such as Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, and William Cobbett eschewed the highly rhetorical and emotive style of Burke’s writing, preferring a rational discourse where a plain style was utilized to bring about as close as possible a correspondence between words and things. Of course, as many have pointed out, all language is metaphorical and Paine’s and Wollstonecraft’s own political writing was heavily rhetorical, although in a way that attempted to disguise its own metaphoricky.³