Coleridge and Contemplation ed. by Peter Cheyne, and: Wordsworth's Monastic Inheritance: Poetry, Place, and the Sense of Community by Jessica Fay

Abstract

Reviewed by: Coleridge and Contemplation ed. by Peter Cheyne, and: Wordsworth's Monastic Inheritance: Poetry, Place, and the Sense of Community by Jessica Fay Michael Tomko (bio) Peter Cheyne, ed. Coleridge and Contemplation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. xx + 332. 1 illustration. $93. Jessica Fay. Wordsworth's Monastic Inheritance: Poetry, Place, and the Sense of Community. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. xiv + 238. $85. Despite a general questioning of critical assumptions about Romantic-era poets that are based on manifestos by those same poets, accounts persist of Romanticism's secularization and privatization of religious devotion that are derived from passages of Samuel Taylor Coleridge or William Wordsworth. For instance, M. H. Abrams's Wordsworthian Natural [End Page 261] Supernaturalism (1971), in which the Romantics make straight the way for Wallace Stevens, remains the starting point of Matthew Mutter's Restless Secularism: Modernism and the Religious Inheritance (2017). Yet this seems increasingly inadequate amid the growing recognition of the historical, cultural, and political import of Romantic-era religion in studies by, among others, Jasper Cragwall, Orianne Smith, or Daniel E. White; the expansion of the literary canon to include more writers, from Hannah More to Elizabeth Inchbald, who engaged with religion in their personal and public lives; and the critical nuancing of the keyword "secularization" itself, most prominently by Colin Jager in Unquiet Things: Secularism in the Romantic Age (2015). Indeed, even the Romantics' own paradigm-making statements no longer seem fully legible when framed by a simplified version of the secularization thesis. For example, at the close of the second book of the 1850 Prelude, Wordsworth gives thanks for the formative care of nature and asserts that Coleridge likewise served "in Nature's temple" (II.463)—or, in the more daring language of 1805, was "the most intense of nature's worshippers" (II.477). While this may seem to reduce piety to the imminent frame, Wordsworth also clearly describes how living with "God and nature communing" has saved him "in this time / Of dereliction and dismay" (II.430, 440–41), a theological wording found in 1850, 1805, and even 1799. He also consistently acknowledges Coleridge's particular role as seeking the "truth in solitude" to bring a "blessing to mankind" (II.461, 471). In other words, The Prelude seems to announce a shared spiritual journey while also delineating two distinct contemplative tasks: Wordsworth's quiet contemplation amid his beloved hills and Coleridge's contemplative inquiry into the workings of his own mind. For Jessica Fay's monograph, Wordsworth's Monastic Inheritance: Poetry, Place, and the Sense of Community, and Peter Cheyne's edited collection, Coleridge and Contemplation, the hard task of recounting the Lake poets' contemplative life is made harder by a contravening, post-Victorian critical history. Fay's focus is on the role of monasticism in Wordsworth's poetry, life, and thinking from his "middle years," about 1807 onwards. That may, at first, seem like a restricted topic, but her appendices map and chronicle forty British and European monasteries that Wordsworth visited or studied, with most referenced in his writing. As Fay's subtitle suggests, the meaning of these monastic sites—mostly naturalized ruins in the North—had significance beyond religion, becoming focal points for tradition, local and national identity, historical reflection, experimentation with literary genre, and, above all, the contemplative aesthetics of "quietness" (27). Wordsworth's "quietness" is the book's heartbeat. Fay's argument represents an attempt to restore a Wordsworth that was known and valued [End Page 262] during the late nineteenth century and thus extends Stephen Gill's account of the poet's spiritual legacy in Wordsworth and the Victorians (1998). But the power of the quiet Wordsworth became more difficult to see, or to hear, after Matthew Arnold's 1879 edition tilted reception toward the "Great Decade" of 1798–1808 and away from previously popular works such as The Excursion, The White Doe of Rylestone, The Tuft of Primroses, and The Ecclesiastical Sonnets—an alternative Wordsworthian canon that structures Fay's chapters. Likewise, in Coleridge and Contemplation, Philip Aherne's contribution attempts to restore a nineteenth-century "Coleridgean intellectual tradition" (116), founded on the omnispective texts of the Highgate Years (1816–34...