William Wordsworth and the Poetics of Natural Piety

Abstract

This dissertation argues that Wordsworth’s natural piety, as a spiritual impulse, informs the lyric movements of his poetry. Its chapters trace the representations of spiritual growth through his works of poetry. By distancing Wordsworth’s concept of natural piety from institutional forms of religious feeling, the chapters consider natural piety as a form of heightened spiritual awareness which involves a conversion from sensual turbulence to spiritual tranquility. Through close readings of many of Wordsworth’s most recognized poems, the project reveals the complex interplay between spiritual sensibility and poetic production and encourages a reevaluation of the spiritual dimensions of English Romanticism. My approach cuts against the grain of scholarship that aligns Wordsworth’s poetry with secularism, understood as a movement from religion into the separate and distinct category of art. I argue that Wordsworth’s “natural piety”—his phrase for an innate, human and spiritual impulse—should be considered as an awareness in its own right, without need of recourse to orthodox religion or secularization theories, and one that regulates his own poetics. This approach sees Wordsworth not as a poet who departs from religious feeling but as one who enlivens and transforms it. On one hand, this dissertation seeks to correct the misconception that Wordsworth’s (and so much of Romantic) poetry is a secularization of religious thought. On the other hand, the dissertation aims at enriching a critical appraisal of, and at raising attention to, the spiritual vitality of Wordsworth’s poetry, the very aspect of his poems that Wordsworth himself valued most.