rewrites the history of early-eighteenth-century English literature around the politics and poetics of "Enthusiasm." It examines the aesthetic theory of the period and reassesses the poetry of two poets seldom read today but very popular in their time: James Thomson and Edward Young. The book also explores the genesis and construction of moral authority through a variety of competing discourses appropriated by poetry, and it traces the rehabilitation of languages of sentiment and Enthusiasm between the English Civil War and the American Revolution.