Oracles and Hierophants

Shedding new light on the institutionalization of literature as a kind of secular scripture in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, David G. Riede explores the ways in which major Romantic poets constructed the authority behind their own writings. He maintains that such seemingly idiosyncratic, iconoclastic writers as Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge ultimately insist upon their own authority, even to the point of imaging themselves as priests or churches.