Exploring the relationship between poverty and religion in William Wordsworth’s poetry, Heidi J. Snow challenges the traditional view that the poet’s early years were primarily irreligious. She argues that this idea, based on the equation of Christianity with Anglicanism, discounts the richly varied theological landscape of Wordsworth’s youth. Reading Wordsworth’s poetry in the context of the diversity of theological views represented in his milieu, Snow shows that poems like The Excursion reject Anglican orthodoxy in favor of a meld of Quaker, Methodist, and deist theologies. Rather than support a narrative of Wordsworth’s life as a journey from atheism to orthodoxy or even from radicalism to conservatism, therefore, Wordsworth’s body of work consistently makes a case for a sensitive approach to the problem of the poor that relies on a multifaceted theological perspective. To reconstruct the religious context in which Wordsworth wrote in its complexity, Snow makes extensive use of the materials in the record offices of the Lake District and the religious sermons and congregational records for the orthodox Anglican, evangelical Anglican, Methodist, and Quaker congregations. Snow’s depiction of the multiple religious traditions in the Lake District complicates our understanding of Wordsworth’s theological influences and his views on the poor.

Approaching Wordsworth’ writings from perspectives which have not been considered in critical literature, this book offers a multiangled reflection on the technicalities of the poet’s religious discourse, including the methodology of The Prelude revision, or Wordsworth’s patent art of "pious postscripts." The book constitutes a self-contained whole and can be read independently. Simultaneously, it creates an unusual duet with The Absent God in The Works of William Wordsworth, whose six chapters follow this book’s eight chapters like a sestet which complements the octave—becoming, thus, a tribute to Wordsworth as one of the most prolific sonneteers in history. Both monographs build their theses on Wordsworth’s entire oeuvre and embrace the whole of his wide lifespan. Their completion in 2020 coincides with several round anniversaries: the 250th anniversary of Wordsworth’s birth, the 200th anniversary of The River Duddon, and the 170th anniversary of the publication of his autobiographical masterpiece, The Prelude.

Exploring the intense relationship between Romantic literature and Methodism, Helen Boyles argues that writers from both movements display an ambivalent attitude towards the expression of deep emotional and spiritual experience. Boyles takes up the disparaging characterization of William Wordsworth and other Romantic poets as 'Methodistical,' showing how this criticism was rooted in a suspicion of the 'enthusiasm' with which the Methodist movement was negatively identified. Historically, enthusiasm has generated hostility and embarrassment, a legacy that Boyles suggests provoked concerted efforts by Romantic poets such as Wordsworth and the Methodist leaders John and Charles Wesley to cleanse it of its derogatory associations. While they distanced themselves from enthusiasm's dangerous and hysterical manifestations, writers and religious leaders also identified with the precepts and inspiration of a language and religion of the heart. Boyles's analysis encompasses a range of literary genres from the Methodist sermon and hymn, to literary biography, critical review, lyric and epic poem. Balancing analysis of creative content with a consideration of its critical reception, she offers readers a detailed analysis of Wordsworth's relationship to popular evangelism within a analytical framework that incorporates Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, and William Hazlitt.

In "A Letter to a friend of Robert Burns," Wordsworth wrote ""And, of poets more especially, it is true - that, if their works be good, they contain within themselves all that is necessary to their being comprehended and relished."" While it is improbable that this assertion was true when he wrote it in 1816, it is certainly not the case for readers of his poetry today. The historical context in which his poetry was written - and which is often reflected in the poems themselves - is, in many respects, little known to today's students of the romantic period, nor to those who simply enjoy reading Wordsworth's poetry. This set of books seeks to remedy that deficiency by providing much needed contextual information. This first volume is set against the background of Wordsworth's life from his birth at Cockermouth in 1770 until his return from Germany in the Spring of 1799. Two subsequent volumes will cover his life in Grasmere and at Rydal Mount respectively.

The first survey of the connections between literature, religion, and intellectual life in the British Romantic period.

In this modest volume the author reflects on the Sequence of Sonnets concerning the River Duddon which William Wordsworth published in April 1820. In the same volume Wordsworth included his poem "Vaudracour and Julia" and his prose travel guide "A Topographical Description of the Country of the Lakes." Although William Wordsworth had now reached his 50th year, this publication was his first real commercial success as a poet. The 'Duddon' Sonnets are somewhat neglected today and his modern popularity rests largely with the "Lyrical Ballads" - partly a collaboration with Coleridge - and his autobiographical poem "The Prelude." The sequence provides an enchanting description of the River and its environs as it falls from its source among the Central Fells of Cumbria to the Irish Sea, as well as providing a master-class in the art of the Sonneteer.

The first study to treat poetry of the Romantic period through the motif of prayer, it covers a range of canonical writers to illustrate how prayer is central to literature's engagement with a secular age.

Focused on the Lake Poets’ prose writing—including their journalism and correspondence—this collection of essays challenges some widely held assumptions. Much of the narrative is Bristol-based, as the city’s reference library holds not only much of Southey’s personal library, but the borrowing registers of the old subscription library which still record the titles that Coleridge and Southey borrowed in the 1790s. It places the poets’ American Susquehanna project, customarily dismissed as the idealistic dreams of Oxbridge students, in the context of European emigration schemes prompted by the American Revolution. Similarly the label “Jacobin,” suggesting French revolutionary brutality, is shown here to be no more apt a description than “Communist” was in 1950s America. However, the book does show that the poets did challenge the government’s social and political assumptions of the day, often from a religious standpoint. The claim that the three poets abandoned democratic impulses when Napoleon invaded Switzerland is also here rebutted by their involvement—a decade later—in defending the independence of Spain and Portugal, not only against Bonaparte, but against their ancien-régime monarchies. When, in 1815, those monarchs were restored, Southey pinned his democratic hopes on the Portuguese colony of Brazil. At home, amid distress caused by wholesale demobilization and shrinkage of economically viable agricultural land, the poets understandably condemned the rabble-rousers and (correctly) predicted an assassination attempt. Coleridge and Southey, both youthful Unitarians and (like Wordsworth) devotees of the “religion of nature,” are argued here to have defended the Established Church against Catholic Emancipation, while the two brothers-in-law’s interest in Islam is shown to be more than mere obsessive Orientalism.

William Wordsworth's poems are inhabited by beggars, vagrants, peddlers, and paupers. This book analyzes how a few key poems from Wordsworth's early years constitute a direct engagement with and intervention into the politics of poverty and reform that swept the social, political, and cultural landscape in England during the 1790s. In Wordsworth's Vagrant Muse, Gary Harrison argues that although Wordsworth's poetry is implicated in an ideology that idealizes rustic poverty, it nonetheless invests the image of the rural poor with a certain, if ambiguously realized, power. The early poems challenge the complacency of middle-class readers by constructing a mirror in which they confront the possibility of their own impoverishment (both economic and moral), and by investing the marginal poor with a sense of dignity and morality otherwise denied them.