This thesis is an examination of the work of William Mason, an eighteenth-century poet who, though highly regarded in his own time, is little known in ours. The thesis seeks to revalidate Mason as a poet worthy of attention in the twenty-first century. The Introduction contextualises Mason, both socially and culturally. Emphasis is given to the importance of Whig politics in his life and works, and to the influence upon him from an early age of the philosophy of John Locke. Attention is also drawn to Mason’s ability as an innovative adaptor of ancient genres, the importance to him of Milton’s verse, and the relevance of his ‘public’ poetry to modern Britain. The first part of Chapter One provides an overview of Mason’s poetic trajectory, from his popularity in the eighteenth century to his decline in the nineteenth. The general loss of interest in eighteenth-century poetry, and its revival in the twentieth, is considered. In the second part of the chapter, Mason’s youthful poetic claim to be the literary and moral descendant of Milton and Pope is examined in the context of his early monody, and its innovative purpose and style. Attention is drawn to the intertextuality that informs much of the poetry discussed in this thesis. The treatment of the Pindaric ode in the hands of earlier poets, and Mason’s far more authentic one, are subsequently discussed. Examples are given which illustrate Mason’s successful treatment of the genre, and of his concern with the preoccupations of the age. In Chapter Two Mason’s georgic, The English Garden, is examined. Consideration is given to Mason’s choice of Miltonic form, to the poet’s employment of his subject, gardening, as a representation of the state of the nation, and to the poet’s personal involvement in the verse in a variety of manifestations. His success in matching subject to form is demonstrated. Mason’s correspondence with Walpole concerning the American war, his collaboration with William Burgh, and his use of prose as well as poetry for political purposes, are discussed. Chapter Three provides a brief account of the attitudes to satire from the late seventeenth century to Pope’s death, and goes on to look at Mason’s own satire. His satires are discussed in the context of his political and literary relationships with Walpole, Gray, Pope and Churchill, and his concern with the issue of slavery is foregrounded. The individual satires are examined, and examples explored of Mason’s novel and varying employment of the genre in the service of his Whig viewpoint. The Conclusion draws together the points made in the body of the text, and claims a place for Mason amongst the eighteenth-century poets rediscovered by recent scholarship.

The end of the eighteenth century witnessed an imaginative mass migration as authors wrote about withdrawing from society. This thesis traces the origins of 'Romantic reclusion' in the works of Cowper and Wordsworth, particularly Cowper's poem The Task and Wordsworth's unfinished masterwork The Recluse, which epitomise the tradition. Romantic reclusion differs from 'solitude' and 'retirement' in that its motives were social. Cowper and Wordsworth wrote about withdrawing in order to criticise the increasing commercialism and competition they saw in British society. Both poets imagined seceding into a community of individuals who would care for a shared set of values, envisaging this as a form of non-violent political protest leading to reform. The thesis builds on recent studies of Romantic community, and develops Raymond Williams's cultural criticism, to refute the New Historicist position that Romantic writing elides history. It proceeds by historicising Cowper's and Wordsworth's concepts of reclusion, tracing echoes of their extensive reading about this subject in what they wrote. Romantic reclusion emerges as an artistic attempt to defend the individual against the dehumanising effects of contemporary society. Its aims can be grouped under four interrelated headings-'creative', 'medical', 'political', and 'natural'-which form the basis of the chapter divisions. Chapter One argues that Cowper and Wordsworth both presented Milton as a precedent for their poetic reclusion. They withdrew from literary society and cut themselves off from the diction of eighteenth-century poetry, because they believed that it turned words into luxury items which could only be purchased by the imaginations of a few. Cowper's translations of Madame Guyon and Wordsworth's modernisations of Chaucer both attempted to develop a plain style which would unite a wider, non-hierarchical community of readers. Chapter Two explores the origins of Cowper's reclusion in his spiritual crisis of 1763-5. Beginning with a study of medical books owned by Cowper's doctor, Nathaniel Cotton, it argues that Cotton regarded Cowper's illness as a product of eighteenth-century models of sociability. Both Cowper and Wordsworth employed Robert Burton's concept of 'Honest Melancholy', or sorrow for the state of one's country, to critique social competition and call for new models of community. Chapter Three examines Cowper's and Wordsworth's presentations of reclusion as the best response to the violence of the American and French Revolutions. Drawing on the works of Classical and modern historians, both poets argued that political revolutions would only succeed once individuals learned to renounce self-interest and govern their selfish passions. The 'retired man' becomes the unexpected political hero of The Task, which in turn forms the basis for Wordsworth's conception of The Recluse. Finally, Chapter Four explores Cowper's and Wordsworth's interests in natural theology, arguing that both poets built on the works of writers including Calvin, David Hartley, and Joseph Butler to explain the psychological mechanism by which reclusion in nature could help to reform the mind, eliminating the selfish passions and teaching individuals to live in an active, mutually responsible community.

Recently, literary critics have increasingly drawn on methods of quantitative analysis to understand the readers and literature of the eighteenth century. Ironically, however, the eighteenth century is home to debates concerning the nature and usefulness of number, counting, and therefore, on some level, quantitative analysis. Eighteenth-century questions of number form an important part of the intellectual history of this period; these questions of number, in turn, hold important implications for language and the period's literature. I argue that the far-reaching influence of eighteenth-century questions of number can be seen especially well in the nature poetry of James Thomson. To explore this influence, I first discuss the problems of number presented to eighteenth-century mathematicians and philosophers by George Berkeley's critique of the infinitesimal calculus popularized by Isaac Newton. I then further explain the problems of number for eighteenth-century thinkers by drawing on philosopher Alain Badiou's theorization of the collapse of number in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This background brings to light connections between eighteenth-century questions of number and similar questions philosophers, such as John Locke, asked of language. These connections set the stage to discuss number in Thomson's The Seasons. Because of Thomson's rather unique exposure to the Newtonian tradition through his Edinburgh education, he was introduced not only to Newton's more popular discoveries, but also the mathematical and philosophical debates that swirled around Newton's methods. Coming out of this environment, Thomson's The Seasons display a particular kind of interest in number at its limits—infinity and zero. This paper will explore Thomson's tropological expressions of infinity and zero in the poem and note how these tropes replicate the logic of the sublime. Ultimately number at its limits in Thomson suggests the problems of expression, and, reading against traditional interpretations of Thomson, the limits of the Enlightenment project.

This thesis investigates the representation of social reality that can be reflected by folk belief and the supernatural within mythic worlds created in epic poetry. Although the society, itself, can be regarded as the creator of its own myth, it may still be subjected to the impact of the synthesized mythic world, and this study seeks to address the roles of the society in the shaping of such mythic worlds. The research is inspired by an innovative approach, using James Macpherson’s Ossian (1760-63) and Elias Lönnrot’s Kalevala (1835-49) as epic models that benefit from mythical traditions. Through the examination and the comparison of these two epic collections, both of which seem to have a close association with social reformation and restructuring, the study explores the universality of human nature. It also reveals the extent mythic worlds may exhibit the ‘realities’ of their source-societies and how mythical tradition may become a reflection of a society’s transforming past modes of thinking. Moreover, the study devotes special attention to the influence of mythic heritage on national awakening and the construction of national identities. The research treats Macpherson as the re-inventor of Gaelic oral tradition with his Ossian, where he portrays a Romanticized image of a gallant past according to the norms of the eighteenth century. Therefore, the mythic world of the epic can be seen as a combination of an ancient heroic past and the aesthetic refinement of a polished age. In this framework, as the product of a society going through a transition period from traditional to modern, Ossian seems to reflect the society’s changing world-view, both celebrating, and mourning for a culture on the verge of extinction. Focusing on the Kalevala, the study analyzes its portrayal of Finnish folk belief. The Kalevala, like Ossian, is an attempt to recover ancient tradition, which seems to revolve around supernatural and divine elements, with hopes to establish a common social reality. It is an expression of Finnish language, belief and culture, whose production was prompted by the looming Finnish nationalism. Therefore, the evolving mode of thought represented in the mythic world of Kalevalaic poems, is expected and favoured by the society, enabling the epic to encourage a social reformation.

During the eighteenth century, the dominant rhetorical and explanatory power of civic humanism was gradually challenged by the rise of a new organising language in political economy. Political economic thought permitted radically different descriptions of what laudable private and public behaviour might be: it proposed that self-interest was often more beneficial to society at large than public-mindedness; that luxury had its uses and might not be a threat to liberty and political integrity; that landownership was no particular guarantee of virtue or disinterest; and that there was nothing inherently superior about frugality and self-sufficiency. These new ideas about civil society formed the intellectual basis of a large body of verse written during the long eighteenth century (at mid-century in particular), in which poets engaged enthusiastically with political economic arguments and defences of commercial activity, and celebrated the wealth and plenty of Britain as a modern trading nation. The work of my thesis is to examine a contradiction in the way in which these political economic ideas were handled. Forward-looking and confident poetry on public themes did not develop pioneering forms to suit the modernity of its outlook: instead, poets articulated such themes in verse by appropriating and reframing traditional genres, which in some cases involved engaging with inherited moral values and philosophical preferences entirely at odds with the intellectual material in hand. This inventive kind of generic revision is the central interest of the thesis. It aims to describe a number of problematic meeting points between new political economic thought and handed-down poetic formulae, and it will focus attention on some of the ways in which poets manipulated the forms and tropes they inherited in order to manage – and make the most of – the resulting contradictions.