Romanticism as Religion: Beyond the Secularization Narrative in Readings of British Romantic Poetry by Devin Jane Buckley Department of English Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Thomas Pfau, Advisor ___________________________ Robert Mitchell ___________________________ Victor Strandberg ___________________________ Nicholas Halmi ___________________________ Michael Gillespie ___________________________ Gabriel Trop Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University 2021 ABSTRACT Romanticism as Religion: Beyond the Secularization Narrative in Readings of British Romantic Poetry by Devin Jane Buckley Department of English Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Thomas Pfau, Advisor ___________________________ Robert Mitchell ___________________________ Victor Strandberg ___________________________ Nicholas Halmi ___________________________ Michael Gillespie ___________________________ Gabriel Trop An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University 2021 Copyright by Devin Jane Buckley 2021 Abstract This dissertation examines the philosophy and poetry of three major British Romantic writers (Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Wordsworth) to contest a popular narrative promulgated by literary scholars and intellectual historians that identifies the Romantic movement as a period of progressive secularization in Western modernity. Whether readers subject secularization to critique, such as Charles Taylor does, or welcome it, as M.H. Abrams does, they alike insist that secularization involves a cultural shift from a transcendent ontology to an immanent one and that Romanticism was essential to this shift. I argue, on the contrary, that Romanticism offers a robustly transcendent ontology and that the failure to recognize this very often results from a reader’s reliance on a limited conceptual framework (a Christianity vs. secularism binary, or, in its broader form, secularism vs. organized religion). Thinking in terms of this dichotomy leads readers to misinterpret and overlook genuinely transcendent (i.e. religious) ideas and dispositions in Romantic writers and, therefore, mischaracterize them as secular. The term “secular” effectively erases alternative forms of religiosity, including what I term “Romantic religion,” by tossing idiosyncratic theologies and spiritualities together with genuinely irreligious and immanentist philosophies into one single category defined strictly in terms of negation (i.e. that which is not Christianity/organized religion). This tendency is clearest when readers implicitly synonymize “religion” with Christianity, or “transcendent ontology” with Christianity, or “belief in God” with “belief in patriarchal, personalist monotheism.” When readers inherit philosophical and theological concepts strictly from iv orthodox Christianity, they overlook novel forms of religiosity found in the Romantic period. For example, a writer’s rejection of personalist monotheism or a writer’s belief in the infinite temporality or cyclicity of the universe is mistaken for evidence of atheism (one of the many terms subsumed by “secular”). Treating each author in each chapter, I argue that Coleridge accommodates Romanticism to Christianity, while Shelley and the young Wordsworth redefine “God” as a transcendent real absolute manifest as the universe/Nature, rather than a man who creates and intervenes in the universe/Nature. To break away from the Christianity vs. secularism framework, I use concepts not only from Christian theology (Coleridge), but also Neoplatonism (all authors), Indian Vedic philosophy (Shelley), and Zen Buddhism (Wordsworth). I argue that none of these writers ought to be regarded as secular, since none of them reject religion per se. To go even further, Romantic religion not only redefines religiosity such that the experience of God can take place outside the clerical, dogmatic, and institutional boundaries of recognized major world religions (in Romantic religion it occurs within aesthetics and the inner life of feeling) but it can also be absent from the experiences of persons traditionally identified as religious solely on the basis of their creedal assent, outward conformity to a given moral law, and/or participation in the ritual practices of an institution. Nonetheless, as the case of Coleridge shows us, Romantic religion is not mutually exclusive with being religious in a traditional sense since Coleridge retains a Romantic sensibility even after converting to Anglicanism. v Dedication This dissertation is dedicated to my parents who taught me to love literature and to think for myself. Without their moral support and intellectual engagement, I would not be who I am today. vi Contents Abstract ....................................................................................................................................... iv Dedication ................................................................................................................................... vi Introduction ................................................................................................................................. 1 1. Coleridge’s Romantic Christianity ...................................................................................... 45 1.1 Coleridge’s Symbol as a Model for the Transcendent’s Immanent Presence ........ 48 1.2 Feeling and Transcendence: Coleridge’s Philosophical Anthropology of the Passions ................................................................................................................................ 63 2. The Soul of the Universe: Shelley’s Impersonal God ........................................................ 89 2.1 Shelley’s Vedic One in Mont Blanc: Towards a Theology of Power ...................... 91 2.2 The Shelleyan Theology Extended: Power is Love is Beauty in Adonais ............ 121 2.3 Theology as a Basis for Politics: Shelley’s Neoplatonic Feminism ....................... 171 2.4 Shelley’s Anti-Voluntarist Liberalism ...................................................................... 217 3. Wordsworth’s Nature Religion ......................................................................................... 239 3.1. Beyond the Christianity vs. Secularism Dichotomy in Scholarly Readings of Wordsworth ...................................................................................................................... 242 3.2 The Child as Philosopher: Imaginative Absorption as Model for Mystical Experience ......................................................................................................................... 265 3.3 The Adult as Philosopher: The Ethical Consolations of Mature Vision ............... 306 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 333 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................ 340 Biography ................................................................................................................................. 347 vii Introduction The past several decades of scholarship in Romanticism have been dominated by historicist, materialist, and post-modern approaches (e.g. Jerome McGann, Paul de Man, Alan Liu) that largely reject the humanist scholarship that defined the study of Romanticism in the mid-twentieth century (e.g. M.H. Abrams, Earl Wasserman, Geoffrey Hartman). Though opposed to each other (often radically) in their hermeneutic approaches, both traditional humanists and their critics nonetheless share an interpretive commitment to a progressive secularization narrative in which the Romantic period is seen as a cultural inflection point in the West’s gradual rejection of religion. Some of these readers regard religion with hostility while others treat it as valuable but obsolete (Abrams). While humanists like Wasserman sometimes emphasize Romanticism’s spiritual orientation, they often oppose the category of the “spiritual” to the theological and religious. Scholars like McGann or de Man understand the Romantic period as a phase in inevitable secularization but hope to evacuate it of the religious vestiges that Wasserman and Abrams celebrate in ‘secular’ form. While humanists and anti/post-humanists usually celebrate progressive secularization, Christian intellectuals like Charles Taylor and John Milbank often lament it. Narratives of progressive secularization in modernity, whether they subject secularization to critique, such as Charles Taylor does, or welcome it as M.H. Abrams does, alike insist on a cultural shift from a transcendent ontology to an immanent one. Such narratives identify Romanticism as a key moment in secularization since it helps this shift to an immanent framework occur. Geoffrey Hartman writes that the Romantic 1 period constituted a “time when art frees itself from subordination to religion or religiously inspired myth and continues or even replaces these.”1 Romantic “art is linked to the autonomous and the individual” so that “the problem of the subjective, the eccentric, the individual grows particularly acute.”2