DESCRIPTION
There was a Romantic-era generation of religious thinkers, philosophers, and poets who believed that the chaotic events in France after the Revolution of 1789 were apocalyptic, the period spoken of in the Book of the Apocalypse, that they were portents of the end of the world and the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, who would return and usher in a ‘Millennium’, a thousand-year period of justice, equity and love. This video essay looks at the concept of Millenarianism in the 1790s and early 1800s as it was evident in the work of such key Romantic writers as Blake, Coleridge, Southey and Wordsworth. It tracks the way in which belief in a in a literal Millennium gave way to a more symbolic and psychological Millennium as the 1790s wore on.
