Liverpool University Press William Gilbert and Esoteric Romanticism: A Contextual Study and Annotated Edition of 'The Hurricane' (Romantic Reconfigurations: Studies in Literature and Culture 1780-1850): 3

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 has done us a service in providing here not only a book that places the poem [The Hurricane] in its cultural and historical milieu but a fully annotated scholarly edition of the poem itself. It is an important new contribution to the expanding literature on Romanticism in Bristol and comes highly recommended. For both its language and its themes, The Hurricane is a poem well worth revisiting." --Steve Poole, The Regional Historian "Other scholars have worked on The Hurricane and William Gilbert; Cheshire's account draws on their work and goes a considerable way beyond it (not least in considering the horrors of slavery in this context). The fascination of this neglected figure is made plain, as are the critical implications of a work with both esoteric roots and Romantic repercussions." --Michael Caines, Literary Criticism "A provocative and illuminating study of William Gilbert... We may hope that Cheshire's indefatigable and imaginative research will continue to help us rediscover the eccentric and fearless genius who proudly declared: "I am not understood. 'Tis well. / I understand myself. It is better."" --Marsha Keith Schuchard, Common Knowledge