Afterword

Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Hemans, imagine, experiment with, and even reject eternity in their poetry. Each poet forges a distinctive relationship with eternity and their works achieve their most individual expressions when imagining or refusing the lure of eternity. The idea of a ‘new heavens and a new earth’ promised in Isaiah 65:17 and reworked in Revelation 21:1 as ‘a new heaven and a new earth’, offered each poet the inspiration to become a new, Romantic version, of the poet-prophet. The conclusion spotlights the diverse modes of imagining and conceptualising eternity as revealed in the poetry. Each poet makes fascinating capital out of the ‘possibility’ of eternity, from Shelleyan desire to Hemans’s nightmare of everlastingness.