Within the boundaries of an unpretentious, sequestered scientific research facility named The Krupto base, a team of advanced scientists happen upon a new planet during daily exploration of the universe. To their surprise the newfound planet is homogenous of the planet Earth with its only dissimilarity being an unnatural brightness eradiating from its atmosphere. Upon hearing of the discovery, the commander of the initiative dispatches a team of scientists on an exploratory expedition to the unknown planet within the vast open endless entity of space. As the team lands on the planet they are met by Chiron, a centaur who invites them to stay with him for the night in Valosia: an ancient realm home to centaurs. However, dark forces are at work, and soon a devastating plan takes effect; a plan devised by a dark sorcerer who is readying himself for a triumphant return to a world that caused his downfall. Thus begins a quest of bravery and friendship, that if successful, will rid the world of its evil.

Whilst religion and the secular have been continually debated contexts for literature of the Romantic era, the dominant scholarly focus has been on doctrines and denominations. In analysing the motif of devotion, Romantic Prayer shifts attention to the quintessential articulation of religion as lived experience, as practice, and as a performative rather than descriptive phenomenon. In an era when the tenability and rationality of prayer was much contested, poetry-a form with its own interlinked history with prayer-was a unique place to register what prayer meant in modernity. This study illustrates how the discourse of prayer continually intervened in the way that poetic practices evolved and responded to the religious and secular questions of the eighteenth and nineteenth-century moment. After laying out the details of prayer's historical position in the Romantic era across a spread of religious traditions, Romantic Prayer turns to a range of writers, from the identifiably religious to the staunchly sceptical. William Cowper and Anna Letitia Barbauld are shown to use poetry to reflect and reinvent the ideals of prayer inherited from their own denominational histories. Samuel Taylor Coleridge's work is analysed as part of a long engagement with the rationality of prayer, culminating in an explicit 'philosophy' of prayer; William Wordsworth-by contrast-keeps prayer at an aesthetic distance, continually alluding to prayerful language but rarely committing to devotional voice itself. John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron are treated in the context of departing from Christianity, under the influence of Enlightenment, materialist, and atheist critiques-what happens to prayer in poetry when prayer as a language traditionally conceived is becoming impossible to maintain?