The Anglican Wordsworth : broadening a religious tradition

• Main Author: Deboo, James
• Published: Lancaster University 2005
• Subjects: 261.58
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.420487

This thesis studies the relationship between William Wordsworth and the Anglican religious tradition, both in terms of the formative influence of Anglicanism over Wordsworth's life and work, and, reciprocally, in terms of the effects Wordsworth may have had on that tradition, during his lifetime and since. Widely-held assumptions of the poet's early secularism and radicalism versus late orthodoxy are examined and supported but problematised. Through a consideration of Anglican and other religious influences on the young poet, the dissemination of these influences later in Wordsworth's life as his commitment to the Anglican tradition grew, and the part played by the Wordsworth family in moulding the religious outlook of the poet and his work and its posthumous interpretation, the nature of Wordsworth's faith is interrogated. Through considerations of specifically, Wordsworth and the Reformation and Wordsworth's contributions to a later tradition of liberal theology, a contribution which sits counter-intuitively with the usual identification of Wordsworth as a conservative High Churchman, a profound contradiction inherent in Wordsworth's religious position will be isolated, and will be resolved by recourse to the application of contemporary, rather than Victorian, religious labels to Wordsworth's Anglicanism.