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COPYRIGHT 2005 Boston University
Deeanne Westbrook. Wordsworth's Biblical Ghosts. New York: Palgrave (St. Martin's Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division), 2001. Pp. 244. $49.95 cloth/E-book.
William A. Ulmer. The Christian Wordsworth, 1798-1805. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. Pp. 228. $62.50 cloth/$21.95 paper.
Although very different books, a similar concern motivates Deeanne Westbrook's Wordsworth's Biblical Ghosts and William Ulmer's The Christian Wordsworth, 1798-1805: insufficient, inaccurate attention has been paid to Wordsworth's theological belief and poetry from 1798 to 1805. Ulmer seeks to separate Wordsworth's Christianity from influential comments made by contemporaries such as Coleridge, Estlin, and others, and rejects the notion that Wordsworth turned to the Church following the drowning of his brother John; he proposes instead a trajectory of religious development in Wordsworth's life, that although sometimes unsteady indicates a quietly growing faith. His literary history tests modern interpretations of Wordsworth's spiritual life against nineteenth-century interpretations, including Wordsworth's own commentary. By methodological contrast, Westbrook's argument rests on a theological poetics. In her definition of the term, "Wordsworth's incarnational poetics, founded on the radically figurative 'linguistics' of the Incarnation, is a theory that, focused on the power of poetic language, insists that words can become flesh, body, things. As written language, poetry acts at once to interpret, translate, and create meanings implicitly in all other sign systems, including the natural world" (39). Unlike Ulmer, she makes resolute claims for Wordsworth's biblical knowledge and the Bible's special revelation through his poetry. Both, however, cite venerable studies of Wordsworth's religion...
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