This interesting and well-researched study provides a deeply illuminating commentary on Romantic poetry beginning with William Cowper in the eighteenth century. It places its discussion of prayer, or a ‘poetics of devotion’, in a secular space that is ‘between theism and atheism’, and as readings of seven poets, from Cowper through Barbauld, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley and Byron, it is firmly a literary study to be largely, though certainly not entirely, distinguished from the established Christian culture of England. Indeed, it has a background in the eighteenth-century context of rationalism and deism as well as Evangelicalism and Unitarianism, but it moves towards the ‘post-Christian’ worlds of the poetry of Keats, Shelley and Byron. As such it poses significant questions for the study of literature and religion. It is true that the conclusion gives some attention to J.H. Newman and the Oxford Movement's indebtedness to Romanticism (rather oddly suggesting that it was Stephen Prickett who first showed us this). It also slightly grudgingly acknowledges the effect of Coleridge on ‘later Victorian theology’, finally suggesting that Romanticism allowed Victorian Christianity to acknowledge that ‘prayer could be legitimated as a quasi-poetic experience’. While this may be so, the truth is far more complex than that in both liturgical and personal devotion. But as a literary study of Romantic poetics this book is never less than worthwhile, despite the tendency to engage with secondary sources and critics in a manner that might well have been better placed within footnotes. And I am left pondering the different ways in which Romanticism and its effect on ‘religion’ are read. As we reach what the last chapter calls ‘the end of prayer in Shelley and Byron’, the Romantic spirit is about to give birth to a new growth in prayer and spirituality in the Church of England, not least through the effects of Tractarianism and its aftermath.