ROMANTICISM AND RELIGION FROM WILLIAM COWPER TO WALLACE STEVENS In honour of Bernard Beatty immortal diamond, Is immortal diamond. Romanticism and Religion from William Cowper to Wallace Stevens Edited by GAVIN HOPPS University of St Andrews, UK and JANE STABLER University of St Andrews, UK © Gavin Hopps and Jane Stabler 2006 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmit- ted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Gavin Hopps and Jane Stabler have asserted their moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company Gower House Suite 420 Croft Road 101 Cherry Street Aldershot Burlington, VT 05401–4405 Hampshire GU11 3HR USA England Ashgate website: http://www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Romanticism and religion from William Cowper to Wallace Stevens. – (The nineteenth century series) 1. Romanticism – Religious aspects – Christianity 2. English poetry – 18th century – History and criticism 3. English poetry – 19th century – History and criticism 4. Religion in literature I. Hopps, Gavin II. Stabler, Jane 821.7’093823 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Romanticism and religion from William Cowper to Wallace Stevens / edited by Gavin Hopps and Jane Stabler. p. cm. – (The nineteenth century series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–7546–5570–9 (alk. paper) 1. Religion and literature – Great Britain – History – 19th century. 2. English literature – 19th century – History and criticism. 3. Romanticism – Great Britain. 4. English literature – 18th century – History and criticism. 5. Religion and literature – Great Britain – History – 18th century. 6. Religious tolerance in literature. I. Hopps, Gavin. II. Stabler, Jane. III. Series: Nineteenth century (Aldershot, England) PR468.R44R66 2006 820.9’145–dc22 2005033639 ISBN–10: 0–7546–5570–9 ISBN–13: 978–0–7546–5570–1 Typeset by Pat FitzGerald Printed and bound by Contents Notes on Contributors vii General Editors’ Preface ix Acknowledgements x Introduction: Grace Under Pressure 1 1 Approaching the Unapproached Light: Milton and the Romantic Visionary 25 Jonathon Shears 2 Cowper Prospects: Self, Nature, Society 41 Vincent Newey 3 ‘Je sais bien, mais quand même …’: Wordsworth’s Faithful Scepticism 57 Gavin Hopps 4 Catholic Contagion: Southey, Coleridge and English Romantic Anxieties 75 Timothy Webb 5 ‘Sacrifice and Offering Thou Didst Not Desire’: Byron and Atonement 93 Peter Cochran 6 ‘I was Bred a Moderate Presbyterian’: Byron, Thomas Chalmers and the Scottish Religious Heritage 107 Christine Kenyon Jones 7 Byron’s Confessional Pilgrimage 121 Alan Rawes 8 Words and the Word: The Diction of Don Juan 137 Richard Cronin 9 ‘Why Should I Speak?’: Scepticism and the Voice of Poetry in Byron’s Cain 155 Tony Howe 10 Byron’s Monk-y Business: Ghostly Closure and Comic Continuity 167 Edward Burns 11 ‘A Fine Excess’: Hopkins, Keats and the Gratuity of Grace 181 Corinna Russell vi Romanticism and Religion from William Cowper to Wallace Stevens 12 ‘Until Death Tramples It to Fragments’: Percy Bysshe Shelley after Postmodern Theology 191 Arthur Bradley 13 Sacred Art and Profane Poets 207 Jane Stabler 14 ‘The Death of Satan’: Stevens’s ‘Esthétique du Mal’, Evil and the Romantic Imagination 223 Michael O’Neill Bibliography 237 Index 255 List of Contributors Arthur Bradley is a Lecturer in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Lancaster University. He has published widely on nineteenth- and twentieth-century religion, philosophy and literature and is the author of Negative Theology and Modern French Philosophy (Routledge, 2004). He is currently working on a book about the relationship between religion and technology in modern European philosophy from Marx to Derrida. Edward Burns works on Shakespearean drama and libertarian poetry. He is the editor of the Arden Shakespeare King Henry VI and a collection of essays, Reading Rochester (1995). He has also authored Character: Acting and Being on the Pre-Modern Stage (1990) and the Writers and Their Work volume on Richard III (2001). Peter Cochran is the editor of the Newstead Abbey Byron Society Review. He has lectured on Byron in London, Oxford, Cambridge, Newstead, Glasgow, Liverpool, Versailles, Salzburg, Yerevan and New York, and published numerous articles on the poet. He is author of the Byron entry in the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, and of the entries on J.C. Hobhouse and E.J. Trelawny for the new Dictionary of National Biography. He has just published his edition of Michael Rees’s translation of Teresa Guiccioli’s Lord Byron’s Life in Italy. Richard Cronin is a Professor of English Literature at the University of Glasgow. His most recent book is Romantic Victorians: English Literature, 1824–1840 (Palgrave, 2002). Gavin Hopps is Academic Fellow in the School of Divinity, University of St Andrews. His forthcoming publications include: Romantic Invocations and Morrissey: The Pageant of His Bleeding Heart. Tony Howe teaches English at St Anne’s College, Oxford. He has research interests across eighteenth-century and Romantic literature and is currently writing a book about Byron and poetry. Christine Kenyon Jones is a Research Fellow in the Department of English at King’s College London. She has written extensively on Byron, and is currently editing a collection of papers about his portraiture. Her book, Kindred Brutes: Animals in Romantic-period Writing, was published by Ashgate in 2001. viii Romanticism and Religion from William Cowper to Wallace Stevens Michael O’Neill is a Professor of English at Durham University. He is the editor of The Poems of W.B. Yeats: A Sourcebook (Routledge, 2004) and (with Mark Sandy) of a four-volume work, Romanticism: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies (Routledge, 2005). He is currently writing a book for Oxford University Press on Romanticism and its legacies. Vincent Newey is a Professor of English at the University of Leicester. His publications include: Cowper’s Poetry: A Critical Study and Reassessment (1982); (as co-editor) Byron and the Limits of Fiction (1988); Centring the Self: Subjectivity, Society and Reading from Thomas Gray to Thomas Hardy (1995); and The Scriptures of Charles Dickens: Novels of Ideology, Novels of the Self (2004). He is reviews editor of The Byron Journal and joint editor of The Cowper and Newton Bulletin, and a Past President of the British Association for Romantic Studies. Alan Rawes is Lecturer in Romanticism in the School of Arts, Histories and Cultures at the University of Manchester. His publications include Byron’s Poetic Experimentation (2000), English Romanticism and the Celtic World (co-editor, 2003) and Romantic Biography (co-editor, 2003). He also edits the Byron Journal and the British Association for Romantic Studies Bulletin and Review. Corinna Russell is Fellow and Director of Studies in English at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. She is completing a book entitled Romance and the Ethics of Response, 1765–1837, and has begun a further research project on aspects of repetition in nineteenth-century literature and thought. She has published on Dickens, Wordsworth and Byron, and on the Romantic Period Novel. Jonathon Shears lectures at the University of Liverpool and is currently writing a book on Byron’s narrative art. He is co-editor of the forthcoming collection of essays entitled Reading, Writing and the Influence of Harold Bloom. Jane Stabler is Reader in Romanticism at the School of English, University of St Andrews. Her book Byron, Poetics and History was published by Cambridge University Press in 2002. She is currently working on a study of the legacy of the Byron-Shelley circle in Italy. Timothy Webb is the Winterstoke Professor of English at the University of Bristol. His books include: Shelley: A Voice Not Understood (1977), English Romantic Hellenism, 1700–1824 (1982) and the Everyman Percy Bysshe Shelley: Poems and Prose (1995). He is currently working on a new scholarly edition of Leigh Hunt’s Autobiography and a book on Romantic Ireland. The Nineteenth Century General Editors’ Preface The aim of the series is to reflect, develop and extend the great burgeoning of interest in the nineteenth century that has been an inevitable feature of recent years, as that former epoch has come more sharply into focus as a locus for our understanding not only of the past but of the contours of our modernity. It centres primarily upon major authors and subjects within Romantic and Victorian literature. It also includes studies of other British writers and issues, where these are matters of current debate: for example, biography and autobiography, journalism, periodical literature, travel writing, book production, gender, non-canonical writing. We are dedicated principally to publishing original monographs and symposia; our policy is to embrace a broad scope in chronology, approach and range of concern, and both to recognize and cut innovatively across such parameters as those suggested by the designations ‘Romantic’ and ‘Victorian’. We welcome new ideas and theories, while valuing traditional scholarship. It is hoped that the world which predates yet so forcibly predicts and engages our own will emerge in parts, in the wider sweep, and in the lively streams of disputation and change that are so manifest an aspect of its intellectual, artistic and social landscape. Vincent Newey Joanne Shattock University of Leicester, UK