‘But I am too particular for the limits of my paper’: Religion in Wordsworth's Poetry, Prose and Talk

Abstract

Statistically speaking, religion is the second most important source of inspiration behind the poetry of William Wordsworth. Religious subjects and motifs, or religion as a source of imagery occur in nearly 500 poems, early and late, minor and major; the entire opus of the poet amounting to a little over 800 titles. This means that religious elements will be found in more than every second piece, in almost two pieces out of three. God and Heaven, Providence and Eternity, Jesus and the Cross, Angels and Paradise, Virgin Mary and Saints, the Bible and Christian psalms, faith and worship; people who pray – young and old, male and female, laymen and clergymen: priests and pastors, monks and nuns, pilgrims and hermits; and the places where they pray: churches and chapels, abbeys and convents, shrines and hermit cells. These religious references are mostly Christian, though, as is well known, some poems written in Wordsworth’s early phase lean in a different direction; some of them ‘might be perverted to serve the purposes of a popular and pantheistic philosophy’, as Christopher Wordsworth, the poet’s nephew and his earliest biographer, put it in his analysis of ‘Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey’. Again, these references are mostly Anglican (reflecting the religious upbringing of his childhood and at Hawkshead School, his adult patriotic feelings, the mindset of his target audience), though surprisingly often Wordsworth takes up Catholic themes and attitudes as well. What is more, these Catholic references in Wordsworth’s poetry are not always negative, which anybody familiar with Wordsworth’s prose will regard as rather unexpected. Reflecting on this specific discrepancy Aubrey de Vere, Wordsworth’s acquaintance and at the same time one of his most perceptive early critics, introduced a curious distinction: Wordsworth was, he remarks in his ‘Recollections of Wordsworth’,