New Book Announcement
William Gilbert and Esoteric Romanticism: A Contextual Study and Annotated Edition of The Hurricane
Paul Cheshire
William Gilbert, poet, theosophist and astrologer, published The Hurricane: A Theosophical and Western Eclogue in Bristol in 1796, while he was on intimate terms with key members of Bristol literary culture: Coleridge published an extract from The Hurricane in his radical periodical The Watchman; Robert Southey wrote of the poem’s ‘passages of exquisite Beauty’; and William Wordsworth praised and quoted a long passage from Gilbert’s poem in The Excursion.
The Hurricane is a copiously annotated 450-line blank verse visionary poem set on the island of Antigua where, in 1763, Gilbert was born into a slave-owning Methodist family. The poem can be grouped with other apocalyptic poems of the 1790s—Blake’s 'Continental Prophecies', Coleridge's 'Religious Musings', Southey's Joan of Arc—all of which gave a spiritual interpretation to the dramatic political upheavals of their time.
William Gilbert and Esoteric Romanticism presents the untold story of Gilbert’s progress from the radical occultist circles of 1790s London to his engagement with the first-generation Romantics in Bristol. At the heart of the book is the first modern edition of The Hurricane, fully annotated to reveal the esoteric metaphysics at its core, followed by close interpretative analysis of this strange elusive poem.
Review:
‘Paul Cheshire is unquestionably the world authority on William Gilbert and The Hurricane. Presenting its key text—The Hurricane—in full at its centre, the book fills a conspicuous gap in current understandings and opens numerous new avenues for further research.’ – Nicholas Roe, Wardlaw Professor of English Literature, University of St Andrews
Liverpool University Press
Romantic Reconfigurations: Studies in Literature and Culture 1780–1850
Hardback ISBN: 9781786941206
June 2018
254 pages
£85.00
Order online at https://liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/products/86240
Relaunched William Gilbert Website http://williamgilbert.com
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