Reading Time in the Long Poem

Reveals how long poems of the long eighteenth century articulate philosophies of time in both content and form Provides a new literary history of the long poem in English in the long eighteenth century, with incisive original readings of the representation of time in three important long poems Argues for the usefulness of the 'long poem' as a critical category that includes genres such as georgic and the prospect poem, as well as epic and romance Demonstrates a distinctive methodological approach, combining analyses of theme, structure, and narrative with reception history in order to approach the history of reading in a unique way Develops understanding of the Romantic reception of Milton by giving proper attention to the mediating role of eighteenth-century poetry Reading Time tells the story of the long poem in the long eighteenth century as it navigated between narrative and description, progress and digression, and time and space. The long poem emerged, between 1660 and 1850, as a medium in which poets could shape and reshape time. Analysing Milton's Paradise Lost, Thomson's The Seasons and Wordsworth's The Prelude, this study reveals how these poets used both the content and form of their long poems to intervene in contemporary debates about the temporalities of free will, nature and identity. Reading Time argues that they use the figure of the prospect, the extended landscape, to imagine time as a space onto which different causal configurations could be mapped. In turn, readers have approached these poems as both temporal and spatial forms, as linear processes and as static structures, demonstrating how the long poem can shape a reader's own experience of time.