Enthusiastic Poetry and Rationalized Christianity: The Poetic Theory of John Dennis

Abstract

The critical writing of John Dennis (1657-1734) participates in the long-standing attempt to appropriate classical aesthetic and philosophical categories in an explicitly Christian framework. His critical project also aims, however, to unite poetry and religion for political ends. His account of poetry is exceptional, in part, because of the ways in which he attempts to base his arguments on a presumed sense of broad political appeal. In offering a poetic theory that purports to unite the aims of Christian religion, imaginative literature, and national politics, Dennis also thus provides a window on what he takes to be the shared assumptions among his English reading public in the early 1700s. In his two main critical works, The Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry (1701) and The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry (1704), Dennis argues that the key to English national success is to cultivate an affective poetic synthesis of religious belief that would reform the moral and civic virtue of the nation. Dennis's argument is surprising, however, in its attempt to rehabilitate the term "enthusiasm" by shifting its meaning from a widely used term of abuse toward a positive suggestion of poetic inspiration. 1 At the same time, his broader emphasis upon "passion" as a positive good would make him, through his Romantic readers, one of the most deeply abiding influences upon English culture. The argument here begins by considering the multiple historical contexts upon which Dennis's writings impinge, especially the horizon of expectations that he engages through the term "enthusiasm" and the mixed critical reception of his work. The argument then traces how his appropriation of classical aesthetics, most notably that ofLong inus, is shaped by a reductive rationalism whose very effects Dennis aims to overcome. Ultimately, I contend that such a view of reason also determines Dennis's "anti-philosophical" defense of the Christianity. In this way, his quixotic attempt to rehabilitate "enthusiasm" also suggests the extent to which publicly available assumptions at the turn of the eighteenth century could subsume Christianity within an account of 235