27 - Romanticism and religious modernity: from natural supernaturalism to literary sectarianism

Summary

Man must & will have Some Religion.

William Blake, Jerusalem

Since Blake issued his injunction ‘To the Deists’, readers have contested the measure and the character of religion to assign British Romantic writing. While perhaps not as pivotal as it once was to definitions of Romanticism, religious faith remains a central issue in critical commentary, and seems to impinge especially on qualitative responses to the Romantic achievement. Thus the competing claims of Classical and Romantic art have generated sharply negative accounts of the latter’s spiritual designs, most famously in T. E. Hulme’s treatment of Romanticism as ‘spilt religion’. By contrast, the dialectics of Enlightenment and Romanticism sometimes yield more positive treatments of Romantic faith as a return from excessive scepticism and materialism. In this sense, the period chronology that authorizes a literary history of Romanticism has religious implications. Romanticism becomes a spiritual dispensation, an individual or coterie struggle to come to terms with the eclipse of shared Christian doctrines. The rough narrative is familiar. A corrosive phase of rational enquiry and sceptical critique (Enlightenment) undermines the established articles of Christian faith, condemning a generation or two of (Romantic) poets to contemplate the ruins of belief. Their individual desires for renewed consecration or enchantment get articulated in radically imperfect aesthetic, psychic and social forms. Romantic poetry is fragmentary because it is conditioned by deteriorating systems of belief; Romantic poetry is lyric and solipsistic because it solicits individual adherence in the absence of a knowable community of believers.