Celestial Aspirations

Celestial Aspirations examines how ancient ideas of rising and flying shaped British writers and artists between the late sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Across poetry, painting, philosophy and religious thought, the period's creative minds drew on classical images of ascent, whether to picture the mind's leaps of reason and scientific imagination, the soul's release from the body, or a ruler lifted to celestial glory.

Philip Hardie traces this inheritance from the verse of Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Donne and Cowley to the painted ceilings of Rubens, Verrio and Thornhill. His central concern is how the politics, beliefs and artistic tastes of the centuries after antiquity received and reshaped classical ideas of time and space, rather than simply repeating them.

Milton's Paradise Lost receives extended attention as an epic built around a Christian story of falling and rising, and as one of the most thoroughly classicizing poems in English. The book then follows the theme through Pope and Edward Young, the Whig sublime, and into the Romanticism of Wordsworth and Tennyson. Hardie considers both public motives for reaching the heavens, such as rewards for political and military achievement, and private ones, such as the pursuit of intellectual and spiritual effort by the individual.

The result is a study of how early modern creative minds reworked ancient visions of time and space.