The core idea of this book is simple: to explore the links between the development of explicit atheism in the period 1780—1830 and the simultaneous emergence of much important new poetry. There is no single currently available book which aims to bring home to a reasonably wide readership at once the vigour, flexibility, coherence and popular appeal of anti-religious arguments from the late eighteenth century to the early nineteenth, and the engagement in or response to them of a significant range of the poets of the time. The emergence of declared atheism into common discourse has been traced by such historians of ideas as J. M. Robertson, Iain McCalman and David Berman, the last of whose A History of Atheism in Britain from Hobbes to Russell (1988) dates ‘the birth of avowed atheism’ from 1782. Such histories of thought, however, have had no particular brief to look at poetry as a special kind of discourse and have hence overlooked it except when it transparently overlaps with philosophy or polemic.

In literary studies, conversely, even some of these moments of transparent overlap have tended to be overlooked: either the issue has been avoided in various ways, or treated as obvious, or only related to one or two writers at a time. As a topic, the full-bodied presence of atheism in Romantic literature has been seen either as barely conceivable or as somehow crudely beside the point, in a context where ‘Romantic poetry’ itself still constitutes a kind of religion.