Romantic Apocalypses

Abstract

It was particularly appropriate that the coming of the millennium in the year 2000 should be marked by the appearance of Morton Paley’s study Apocalypse and Millennium in English Romantic Poetry,¹ since he there concerns himself not only with the part played by those concepts in the thinking of the early English Romantic poets but with its place in Western thinking generally. Although the biblical account of the Last Things, “eschatology,” as it came to be called, was always there, waiting to provide a framework for events that seemed to have a corresponding quality, Paley also notes that it did not have a finally authoritative organization among its elements. A point that he stresses in consequence, and that gives much of the shape to his study, is the degree to which the idea of the apocalypse and that of the millennium tended to go together, while still remaining separable, so that at certain times people would concentrate particularly on the one or the other. It was not very clear, for instance, whether the thousand years were to be a period preceding the Last Judgment or whether they would be a par- adisal state to follow it for those who had been judged among the righteous. An interpreter could simply choose which elements to emphasize, therefore, and if in doubt place them in the order that seemed most appropriate.