Wordsworth, Bunyan and the Puritan Mind

Abstract

J. Crofts' brief discussion of popular religious biographies of the seventeenth century during his Warton Lecture on Wordsworth and the Seventeenth Century (London, 1940) remains the only specific attempt at placing Wordsworth in relation to traditions of (or, extreme Protestant) thought and experience. The remarks in Geoffrey Hartman's Wordsworth's Poetry 1 787-1814 (New Haven, 1964)-for example, that Wordsworth 'carried the quest for evidences of election into the most ordinary emotional contexts (p. 5)-are suggestive but undeveloped. The subject evoked in different ways by these two critics deserves more considered investigation. It must be said at once that Wordsworth did not acknowledge any personal heritage. None the less, certain aspects of do provide a telling perspective from which to explain and interpret emphases within his work. (I use Puritan and Puritanism throughout not in a theological or moral sense but to indicate a general frame of mind. Wordsworth's religious views cannot themselves be connected with Puritanism.)' In particular, his determined cultivation of his private experiences and insights which often involves discovery of the exceptional within the apparently slight and commonplace, his mingling of spiritual and emblematic with material, sometimes matter-of-fact, authenticity and his constant search for a significant continuity in his life all have conspicuous precedent in writings, as does the expression in his poetry of the problems, and resources, of a man preoccupied with his own identity and destiny, with the burdens and privileges of election. Nor do we need to make a complete return to the seventeenth century, the age of proper, for comparisons, as Crofts would have us believe by designating Wordsworth <a seventeenthcentury ... born near the end of the rational eighteenth century;2 for in the Evangelical Revival, especially the Calvinist branch (for which the poet Cowper was among the chief spokesmen), we find some continuation of the attitudes and procedures of earlier radical Protestantism. This latter-day produced,