Wordsworth and the Question of "romantic Religion"

This book draws on research in the psychology and sociology of religion to offer a reinterpretation of transcendent experiences, metaphysical concerns, and conflicting beliefs - the religious dimension - of some of Wordsworth's major poetry. Applying a novel interdisciplinary paradigm developed out of studies of religion, Nancy Easterlin suggests Wordsworth's work at times demonstrates a tendency to resolve conflicting beliefs and experiences through the formal and semantic unities of poetry. While analyses of the religiousness of romanticism are sometimes marred by an imprecise or shifting definition of the word religion, the method adopted by Easterlin encourages clarification of the issues and phenomena under discussion. Hence, she indicates at the outset that stable religious belief typically requires both a public and a private dimension, joining orthodox commitment and structure to private experiences of enlightenment. This definition of religion underlies the present interpretation and provides the basis for the author's assertion that the religious elements of Wordsworth's poetry are chronically problematical. For in the poetry, the private dimension of religious experience exists to the exclusion of systematic belief, and vice versa. Easterlin finally asserts that Wordsworth's poetical decline was the result of a conflict between the need for the certainties of orthodox faith and the naturalistic beliefs resulting from his personal experience and poetic explorations. Wordsworth's later Anglican faith is impersonal and unconvincing, for it rests on the ideal of mystical types of experience which for the poet had led to naturalistic faith and a discursive, speculative poetics.