Wordsworth and the Question of 'Romantic Religion.' - book reviews

Criticism, Summer, 1997 by David P. Haney

This investigation of the role of religious experience in Wordsworth's poetry draws on the pragmatic psychology of William James and the modified empiricism of modern developmental psychology. In a refreshing departure from Freud's view of religion as a regressive illusion, as well as from recent critical positions of either religious affirmation or religious skepticism, Easterlin focuses on how religious experience functions in psychologically specific ways as an integral part of (rather than an escape from) reality. Her focus on religious experience instead of religious doctrine frees her from seeing Romantic religion as simply "secularized" in the tradition of M. H. Abrams; it also enables her to connect, rather than separate, religious experience and social engagement. She makes the much-needed observation that traditionally, "transcendent experience" is part of "an interactive process directed toward spiritual clarity and ethical engagement" (39).

Easterlin sees Wordsworth, like James, as facing the problem of how to pursue and validate authentic versions of such experience in the absence of the institutional support provided by orthodox belief systems, which have traditionally provided contexts for mystical and meditational practices. This problem provides the main thread of her argument about "Tintern Abbey," the Prelude, the Excursion, and the Ecclesiastical Sonnets. She sees "Tintern Abbey" as an effort to use poetic form to contain an internalized religious experience, but she finds that the mystical ineffability of this experience ultimately highlights the "discrepancy between the ground of religion and the ground of art" (45). Because the "creed" of "Tintern Abbey" is produced rather than merely authenticated by a poetry of self-qualification, paradox, and humanized nature, the desire for a permanent system of belief is ultimately deconstructed in the face of language's inadequacy to support such a system. In the Prelude, Wordsworth abandons such attempts to represent mystical experience directly, and instead integrates "extra-conceptual" experiences into ordinary life by seeing the very problem of expressing such states as "a useful paradigm for the individual struggle to make sense of life and to give it shape through language" (82). The inability of important conceptual structures such as language and time to express such states is accepted as a sign of the poet's dependence on "the universe beyond himself" (84).

The conflict in the Prelude between the beliefs derived from such experience and "available forms of explanation" (101) replays Tintern Abbey's" conflict between religious experience and orthodoxy. Despite attempts to ground experience in religious orthodoxy, the true sources of knowledge in The Prelude are nature and the maternal bond. In a nicely nuanced variation on this familiar theme, Easterlin sees nature as both supernatural and humanized, and by avoiding the Freudian/Lacanian paradigm of the maternal bond as pre-oedipal and pre-linguistic, she is able to see this bond in a much more Wordsworthian way as a nurturing force continuous with adult realities. In the Excursion and the Ecclesiastical Sonnets, Easterlin, like most critics, sees a return to religious orthodoxy, but Wordsworth's earlier discovery of the conflict between individual religious experience and orthodoxy means that individual mystical -- and by extension poetic -- experience must now be effectively renounced in favor of orthodoxy. In the Excursion, however, this new orthodoxy is not really orthodox, because it is conditioned, not by divine dispensation, but by human need and history (a history that acknowledges the transience, rather than the permanence, of religious institutions), and it remains in conflict with the claims of the individual. In the Ecclesiastical Sonnets' tracing of Anglican history, the individual is reduced to a product of institutional history. Thus, despite Wordsworth's assertion of religious orthodoxy, the continued conflict between individual and orthodox religious experience in fact emphasizes the inadequacies of orthodoxy: "Wordsworth's faith is a product of psychic necessity and self-discipline rather than of felt belief" (150).

Easterlin's pragmatic psychological paradigm enables valuable insights, and her readings of individual poems are usually skillful and sensitive. However, students of Wordsworth and of nineteenth-century religion may find this book's scholarship somewhat thin. For example, the inclusive religious "orthodoxy" with which Wordsworth struggles is never explicitly defined. This is particularly problematic in the discussion of the later poems, because the argument for a Wordsworthian historical/institutional orthodoxy, set against what is presumably the Anglican "theological" orthodoxy, fails to account for the complex relation between theological and historical authority within a state religion that was undergoing a great deal of self-examination in the early nineteenth century.