Abstract
I begin with two passages of prose. The first is from John Wesley, in this 1779 Preface to A Collection of Hymns for use of the People called Methodists (1780): ‘When Poetry thus keeps its place, as the handmaid of Piety, it shall attain, not a poor perishable wreath, but a crown that fadeth not away.’1 The second is from Wordsworth, from the second of his Essays on Epitaphs (published in The Friend, 1810, when Coleridge was hard up for copy): ‘ages must pass away before men will have their eyes open to the beauty and majesty of Truth, and will be taught to venerate Poetry no further than as She is a Handmaid pure as her Mistress—the noblest Handmaid in her train!’2
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Notes
The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and J. W. Smyser (Oxford, 1974) II, 79.
Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company, rev. edn (Ithaca, NY, and London, 1971) p. 1.
Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and their Writers, ed. Edith J. Morley (London, 1938) I, 87.
The Correspondence of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Richard Watson Dixon, ed. C. C. Abbott (London, 1935) p. 141.
Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion, tr. E. Fischoff (London, 1965) p. 46.
Pascal’s terms, as summarised in Michael Edwards, Towards a Christian Poetics (London, 1984) pp. 2–8.
See J. R. Watson, Wordsworth’s Vital Soul (London, 1982) pp. 152–5.
Coleridge, Collected Works, I: Lectures 1795 on Politics and Religion, ed. Lewis Patton and Peter Mann (Princeton, NJ, 1971) p. liii.
John Stuart Mill, Collected Works, I: Autobiography and Literary Essays, ed. J. M. Robson and J. Stillinger (London, 1981) p. 151: ‘I felt myself at once better and happier’ (ch. 5).
Wordsworth, ‘The Ruined Cottage’ and ‘The Pedlar’, ed. James A. Butler (Hassocks, Sussex, 1979) pp. 3, 14.
Max Weber, ‘The Sociology of Charismatic Authority’, repr. in Max Weber on Charisma and Institution Building, éd. S. N. Eisenstadt (Chicago and London, 1968) p. 21.
Wordsworth, ‘The Ruined Cottage’ and ‘The Pedlar’, p. 16 (letter of 6 Mar 1798).
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© 1986 David Jasper
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Watson, J.R. (1986). Wordsworth and the Credo. In: Jasper, D. (eds) The Interpretation of Belief. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18333-3_10
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