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 project, “William Wordsworth and the Poetics of Natural Piety,” considers Wordsworth’s spiritually sensibility as a force of lyrical production. I argue that Wordsworth’s “natural piety”—his phrase for an innate, human and spiritual impulse—should be considered an awareness in its own right, without recourse to orthodox religion or secularization theories, and one that regulates his own poetics.
On the one hand, the project resists exclusively Christian interpretations of Wordsworth’s poetry. On the other hand, it cuts against the grain of a dominant strain of scholarship that, for the past sixty years, has regarded the spiritual sensibilities of Romantic literature as fundamentally secular, as a retreat from, or assimilation of, true religion into a separate aesthetic category. As theories for evaluating Romantic literature, secularization narratives often lead critics to regard literary expressions of spiritual sensibility as perfunctory, hackneyed, or even illegitimate expressions of religious thought. But it seems unlikely that any reader, innocent of scholarly prejudice, would ever consider Wordsworth’s poetry as secular. Certainly the majority of his nineteenth-century readers did not. By forcing a modern conception of religion and secularism upon Romantic-era poetry, such evaluations ask readers to understand Wordsworth’s poetry in a way that neither the poet nor his readers understood it. My thesis presents a new approach. Pairing close reading and philological methods with a grounding in the development of religious and literary traditions, my dissertation contends that understanding the character of Wordsworth’s natural piety is necessary to properly interpret and evaluate his poetic art and achievement.
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.