The last decade of the eighteenth century was characterized by the anticipation of an imminent apocalypse, provoked by the political events that were taking place in France. Writers and philosophers viewed the French Revolution as the onset of sweeping events leading to fundamental reform and a clean slate in human history. Robert Southey's recollection of the early 1790s succinctly describes the spirit of “that tempestuous age” as promising a new beginning: “Old things seemed passing away, and nothing was dreamt of but the regeneration of the human race.”

In an essay on women's writing, Anne K. Mellor suggests that Romantic women writers did not actively participate in the apocalyptic imagination because of the difference in women's perception of time as “continuous, even progressive” and their peculiarly “feminine mode of thought,” which was “inter-relational and communitarian,” refusing to imagine an eschatological ending to human history. Mellor's point sheds light on how women's understanding of the socio-political context influenced their vision of the historical moment. Despite the alleged dearth of а marked female apocalyptic discourse, women poets of the century incorporated apocalyptic imagery in their poems to portray the cultural and historical crisis that had seized Europe.

Mary Robinson's poem The Progress of Liberty is a case in point. Robinson employs the imagery of popular modes of the time, namely, the natural sublime and the gothic, to lend the historical situation apocalyptic and millenarian overtones. Robinson's poem presents the terrors of the French Revolution as apocalyptic in nature, using graphic imagery to portray the violence and the aberrant turn of the revolutionary events. The poem then continues with a vision of a regenerated state of society, operating on natural laws. In drawing upon popular means of representation and discourses, Robinson engages with the complex network of symbolic configurations, which characterized the last decade of the century and its political ideologies.