In order to understand the Romantic fascination with prophets, we begin with an influential eighteenth-century figure poised on the cusp of neoclassicism and Romanticism: the English biblical scholar Robert Lowth – also a medieval historian, a shrewd politician, and the author of a bestselling English grammar handbook, who was destined to become the Bishop of London. Lowth is a key figure in the creation of the modern “poetics of prophecy.” Taking an approach which would become known in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as “the Bible as literature,” Lowth initiated and represents an important new way of regarding the Bible aesthetically, one which we encounter through his construction of Isaiah as a strong prophet. Yet examining the fissures in Lowth’s ideal Isaiah – who he reads as a perfect combination of elegance and sublimity – can also help us think more critically about the literary study of the Bible.

The link between religion and Romantic poetry has long and recurrently been recognized. The present chapter, however, argues that this link is philologically comprised, with Romantics poetically investing in global religious traditions via acts of linguistic recovery. Invoking Robert Lowth’s lectures on biblical poetry as its precedent, this chapter explores three representative case studies of Romantic poetic engagement with sacred literatures from the Middle East, as well as later Middle Eastern-language renditions of Romantic poets, surveying William Blake’s Hebrew prophecies, Thomas Moore’s Islamicate receptions, and Lord Byron’s Armenian pilgrimages.