My research asks: how might spiritual and devotional sensibilities govern the shape of sound and meaning in lyric poetry? How might the devotional impulses within lyric traditions be considered from a literary perspective? And how might literary criticism account for the spiritual awareness of devotional and non-religious poetry beyond the contemporary categories of the religious and the secular? Questions like these have informed my research in the fields of British Romantic literature, English poetry, and poetics.
Dissertation | William Wordsworth and the Poetics of Natural Piety
My dissertation participates in a new wave of post-secular study of Romantic religion. Through close readings of many of Wordsworth’s most celebrated poems, my chapters develop a critical vocabulary by which literary criticism might discuss the formal enactments of spiritual and devotional experience in the Romantic lyric. I argue that Wordsworth’s “natural piety” is an important spiritual sensibility for Romantic-era poetics. My claim cuts against the grain of prevailing secularization theses. For the past sixty years, an important strain of scholarship has regarded—and sometimes dismissed—Wordsworth’s verse as a strain of secularism that adopts imitative religious language but avoids a deeper spiritual commitment. These arguments rely on a critical binary that makes religion synonymous with transcendent, institutional, even orthodox religion, and secularism with pantheism, irreligion, or even atheism. The religious impulse of Wordsworth’s poetry is more complex than this binary allows. I argue that Wordsworth should be understood within a broader framework of spiritual continuity rather than religious departure.
Research Interests. While my research focuses primarily upon English Romantic literature, my interests often lead me across disciplines and periods. My conference presentations, articles, and teaching experiences have covered aspects of early church and medieval theology, English medieval allegory, Shakespeare, sixteenth-century English theology, seventeenth-century devotional literature, the prose and poetry of the English Puritans and Carolingian divines, eighteenth-century English poetry and science, German idealism and early German Romanticism (Frühromantik), American Romantic poetry, Victorian novelists such as George MacDonald and Lewis Carroll, authors of the twentieth-century Oxford fantasy movement, contemporary poetry, and rhetoric and composition.