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

Criticism, Summer, 1997 by David P. Haney

The historical progression Easterlin identifies in Wordsworth may also be somewhat skewed by her narrow selection of Wordsworth texts. For example, according to Easterlin, in the sonnet "I saw the figure of a lovely maid," the later Wordsworth "imagines his living and beloved daughter as a dissolving illusion" instead of "seeing the potentially illusory as real" as he does earlier. But do not some of the Lucy poems, dating back as early as 1799, imagine just such a dissolution of the real? ("But she is in her grave, and, oh, / The difference to me!" ["She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways" 11-12].) Easterlin discusses the "Imagination" passage in Book 6 of the Prelude in terms of language's inadequacy, but without noting Wordsworth's revision of this passage, in which "Imagination" becomes explicitly subject to the "sad incompetence of human speech" (1850 Prelude 6.593). This and other revisions of the Prelude would have played nicely into her argument about Wordsworth's later acceptance of the limitations of poetic language.

More important is Easterlin's neglect of Wordsworth's own discussions of some of this book's central concerns, a neglect particularly noticeable because her argument is generally sympathetic to the psychological turns of Wordsworth's thought. Though she skillfully takes Paul de Man to task for misunderstanding Wordsworth's "habit of merging literal and figurative language" (98), she fails to address Wordsworth's central discussion of this issue in the essays "Upon Epitaphs" (one of de Man's favorite Wordsworthian texts). Much of her argument turns on the contrast between religion's ability to contain transcendent experience institutionally and poetry's inability to do so, but she never mentions Wordsworth's discussion of the affinity between religion and poetry"-an affinity conditioned by religion's ability to be "reconciled to substitutions" versus poetry's need for the "sensuous incarnation" of language -- in the 1815 "Essay, Supplementary to the Preface" (The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Smyser, 3 vols. [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974] 3: 65).

Easterlin chooses to discuss transcendence via a psychologically defined "mysticism" rather than the more common route of the "sublime," excusing herself from an extended engagement with the latter term by calling it "a hopelessly skating signifier if there ever was one" 160n11). However, her argument shares a good deal of unavoidable ground with both Romantic and modem discussions of the sublime, and for Wordsworth and his contemporaries the term was not at all a "skating signifier," but had very specific, often pragmatically psychological definitions in both the English and the German traditions, The "irony" that she perceives in the way language's inadequacy indicates the self's dependence on a realm beyond its own conceptual limits is a clear variation on the familiar theme of the Kantian sublime, and a fuller treatment of that tradition would perhaps have lessened Easterlin's own repeated dependence on an undefined sense of "paradox" and "irony." Even if a full account of the sublime is beyond the scope of this book, Easterlin should at least have discussed Wordsworth's own fragmentary essay on the sublime and the beautiful, because it is directly relevant to her distinction between the unrepeatability of transcendent experience in the writing or reading of poetry and the repeatability of such experience in religious rituals (46). Wordsworth argues (against Burke) that in fact non-institutional sublime experience, such as the sublime perception of landscape, can be cultivated into a habitual, repeatable experience. Easterlin's neglect of much modem work on the sublime is particularly unfortunate because, for example, the deep Freudianism of Thomas Weiskel's classic The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Sructure and Psychology of Transcendence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976) would have provided a logical target for her pragmatic critique.