Abstract
In the realm of belief, the second generation of Romantic poets moved beyond their distinguished predecessors toward scepticism. Although Wordsworth and Coleridge returned to the Anglican Church of their birth, neither Byron, Shelley, nor Keats was of any church in his maturity. All three had rejected organized Christianity. Shelley stated he had once been an enthusiastic deist but never a Christian.1 For Keats the Christian was merely one of many ‘Schemes of Redemption’,2 and Byron, characteristically, in the last years of his life was still conducting within himself an interior dialogue between the deistic and the Christian points of view. He requested Murray to send him a copy of Charles Leslie’s Short and Easie Method with the Deists, but he also told James Kennedy, the Methodist minister who was attempting to bring him to accept orthodox Christianity, that he was ‘not perfectly satisfied’ with the author’s ‘mode of reasoning’.3
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Notes and References
BLJ, VIII, p. 238 (Byron-Murray, 9 October 1821); James Kennedy, Conversations on Religion with Lord Byron (London: John Murray, 1830) p. 231.
In The Complete Poetical Works of Byron, ed. Paul Elmer More (1905; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1933) p. 744.
On Coleridge, see Jonas Spatz, ‘The Mystery of Eros: Sexual Initiation in Coleridge’s “Christabel”’, PMLA, 90 (January 1975) pp. 107–16.
Alvin B. Kernan, The Plot of Satire (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1965) pp. 176, 205.
BPP, p. 2. On the eighteenth-century roots of Blake’s language, see Josephine Miles, Eras and Modes in English Poetry (1957), chapter 5, The Sublimity of William Blake’.
E. S. Shaffer, ‘Kubla Khan’ and The Fall of Jerusalem: The Mythological School in Biblical Criticism and Secular Literature, 1770–1880 (1975), ch. 1.
For the former, see Arthur O. Lovejoy, ‘The Meaning of Romanticism for the Historian of Ideas’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 2 (June 1941), especially pp. 272–8; for the latter, René Wellek, ‘The Concept of Romanticism in Literary History’, Comparative Literature, 1 (1949), and Peckham, ‘Toward a Theory of Romanticism’, PMLA, 66 (1951), reprinted in his Triumph of Romanticism (1970). See, particularly, section II of Peckham’s essay.
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© 1983 John Clubbe and the Estate of Ernest J. Lovell, Jr
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Clubbe, J., Lovell, E.J. (1983). English Romanticism: the Grounds of Belief. In: English Romanticism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-06726-8_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-06726-8_9
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