‘A Closet or a Secret Field’: Horace, Protestant Devotion and British Retirement Poetry

Contrary to studies that link British poems celebrating rural retirement with the Latin poetry of Horace, this essay argues that such poems equally reflect the influence of Protestant devotional writing and ritual. Retirement poetry not only appears in religious guidebooks and collections of devotional verse but also shares much of the rhetoric characterising devotional writing of the period. The essay also stresses the importance of taking into account audience, context and function when categorising eighteenth‐century poetry as secular or religious. An appendix lists over 300 retirement poems published in the British Isles between 1690 and 1830.