Starting in the later eighteenth century, and with gathering force into and through the nineteenth century, poets and other writers addressed themselves to a new and unprecedented problem: that of the human spirit which must steer itself, unaided by any automatic or implicit faith, through "the dark night of the soul" of spiritual crisis.
This was a challenge which had not arisen before, at least not in the sense that the poets of the Romantic and Victorian eras faced it. In the age of faith, which in literary terms carries us through Milton, the immanence of God, as supporter and judge alike of the soul in its confrontation with personal crisis, was in general neither challenged nor affirmed, but simply assumed. But if the Restoration of 1660 restored a king, it dethroned the immanent God, exiling him from immediate presence to the remote status of Great Clockmaker, removed in time and space beyond the furthest edge of the Newtonian universe--and in that universe, which knew no Big Bang and no law of entropy, this edge was itself infinitely removed from the sphere of human awareness.
The Augustan Age appears not to have missed the older God; in exiling him it also, for a time, exiled the very concept of spiritual crisis. Its literary imagination was more interested in the Newtonian universe itself, its richness and ordered complexity. Its poetry may delight us with its balance and precision, but it does not cry out in the vastness of the night, and it seldom moves us to tears.
Only after the passage of another century did the Enlightenment's orderly Palladian structures come to be felt, at least by some, as an imprisoning maze; from this maze the Romantics sought to break out into the wilderness beyond. But what now lay beyond the orderly world of the Augustans was indeed a wilderness, such as had not existed in the literary imagination before. Men and women might turn back to God; the era that saw the Romantic ...