In Romanticism and Classicism, T. E. Hulme wrote, “Romanticism then, and this is the best definition I can give of it, is spilt religion.” In this view, Romanticism holds that “man is intrinsically good, spoilt by circumstances;” while in classicism man “is intrinsically limited, but disciplined by order and tradition to something fairly decent.” In Hulme’s view, Romanticism opposes Christianity at its core: “One may note here that the Church has always taken the classical view since the defeat of the Pelagian heresy and the adoption of the same classical dogma of original sin.” Romanticism is Pelagian; classicism is orthodox. Hulme provides the following metaphor: “To the one party man’s nature is like a well, to the other like a bucket,” because for the Romantic the poet runs deep with inspirational resources, while for the classicist, poets give shape and definition to inspiration drawn from elsewhere. Francis Jeffrey said of Wordsworth in his infamous contribution to the 1814 Edinburgh Review, “This will never do.” Hulme says the same of the whole Romantic project: “I object even to the best of the romantics.”^[1]

Hulme’s totalizing dismissal of the Romantic project accords well with the concerns of many Christian thinkers: “You don’t believe in a God, so you begin to believe that man is a god. You don’t believe in Heaven, so you begin to believe in a heaven on earth. In other words, you get romanticism.”^[2] Romanticism, for Hulme, is a heresy in verse, and just as you shouldn’t drink a little bit of poison, you shouldn’t embrace a little bit of heresy. By turning the poet into a well rather than a bucket, so the argument goes, the Romantic poet puts himself in the place of God, inspiring himself to write his own scriptures of what Hulme calls “damp poetry.”

The contrary claim I make in this piece is that William Wordsworth (1770-1850) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) ultimately labored to unspill Romantic religion, so to speak, back into the direction of orthodox faith, and that their essential return to Christianity was a fulfillment rather than simply a departure from their earlier Romantic years.

Such a claim may startle many. The Romantic poets often feature negatively in Christian decline narratives about the modern West. Carl Trueman, for instance, charges Wordsworth with being instrumental in the destructive “inward turn” of the modern self.^[3] Elsewhere, the apparent pantheism in Wordsworth’s poem “Tintern Abbey,” for example, understandably unsettles the Christian reader:

….And I have felt 
A presence that disturbs me with the joy   
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime   
Of something far more deeply interfused,   
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,   
And the round ocean, and the living air,   
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:   
A motion and a spirit, that impels   
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,   
And rolls through all things. 

These lines could be taken as simply saying that “It is in God in whom we live and move and have our being,” were it not for Wordsworth’s persona, speaking to Dorothy, later saying, “I, so long/A worshipper of Nature, hither came/Unwearied in that service.

Wordsworth and Coleridge both departed from and later were reconciled to the Church of England. Wordsworth wandered as a noncommittal cloud through the political and philosophical fomentation of radicals in London and Paris; Coleridge took the pulpit as a Unitarian who saw trinitarianism as tyranny’s irrationality made dogma.^[4] Admirers of both leading Romantic writers saw them as traitors of the cause as both poets became more politically and theologically conservative–so Hazlitt thought of Coleridge and Browning of Wordsworth.

But the case I would make is that Wordsworth and Coleridge became, in fact, increasingly committed to the Church of England in direct proportion to how deeply they saw its orthodoxy as fulfilling the yearnings of the Romantic heart. As Romantics, Coleridge and Wordsworth believed that the imagination revealed truth, but not in a sense that indicates that truth is subjective or self-defined through imagination. Such a view would be more in keeping with John Keats when he wrote, “Whatever the imagination apprehends must be true whether it existed before or not.” Rather, for Coleridge and Wordsworth, the Romantic imagination did not make true what was not true. They do not regard the imagination as a license to believe whatever one wants within, but to believe what is impressed upon oneself from without through an honest and rigorous survey of the imagination’s functions.

Both poets write in response to the excesses of the Enlightenment, concerned that the reduction of knowledge to empirical and rational study would close out the first person perceptions of real individuals. While their initial response to this problem contained unorthodox elements, the core Romantic faith was maintained as their fidelity to Scripture grew. The Christian Romantic perspective put forward by Coleridge and Wordsworth is the ultimate upshot of their writing, which can be described best as a recovery of biblical epistemology. In this view, cultivating the imagination makes our minds more fully capable of entering the vision of the world put forward by the Scriptures.

The Faith of the Christian Romantics

Since I contend that Romanticism propelled both Wordsworth and Coleridge back into Christian orthodoxy, it will be useful to demonstrate that they both did indeed return to historic faith in Christ after some time in the far country.

It is worth noting briefly how both poets’ unorthodox years were intertwined. Coleridge’s promotion of a loose marriage of “One Life Philosophy” and Unitarian beliefs sent a younger Wordsworth adrift into a theism that embraced neither orthodox Christianity nor pantheism fully, but a noncommittal third way borrowing from both. Ulmer writes that Coleridge “brought with him the notion of the One Life,” which “posited a single vital energy permeating and ontologically underlying all natural creation. Coleridge’s version of the idea represented his reformulation of the radical Unitarianism of Joseph Priestly.”^[5] The pantheistic implications found in “Tintern Abbey” trace their origin to some extent to Coleridge’s influence.

What evidence, then, of the prodigals’ return? Admittedly, Wordsworth was more reluctant to essay into the realm of apologetics and proselytizing than Coleridge. Many of his most direct assertions of Christian faith come in the context of letters, addresses, or reports from friends. His poetry, especially early examples such as “Tintern Abbey,” rarely enters into doctrinal assertions. One looks in vain for the devotional poetry of a Herbert or Donne. Wordsworth explained his reason for this in another letter:

For my own part, I have been averse to frequent mention of the mysteries of Christian faith; not from a want of a due sense of their momentous nature, but the contrary. I felt it far too deeply to venture on handling the subject as familiarly as many scruple not to do. I am far from blaming them, but let them not blame me, nor turn from my companionship on that account. Besides general reasons for diffidence in treating subjects of Holy Writ, I have some especial ones. I might err in points of faith, and I should not deem my mistakes less to be deprecated because they were expressed in metre. Even Milton, in my humble judgment, has erred, and grievously; and what poet could hope to atone for his apprehensions[169] in the way in which that mighty mind has done?^[6]

Given this circumspection regarding matters of faith, the fact that religious themes do still show up in Wordsworth’s poetry at all suggests the strength of his feeling. “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” (1807) espouses belief in the immortality of the soul; The Excursion (1814) culminates in a priest’s Romantic perception of God; the Ecclesiastical Sonnets (1821) celebrate the history of the Church of England–all these Wordsworth wrote despite his broad reticence to poeticise about faith.

Christianity was too close to, not too far from, Wordsworth’s heart for him to cheaply capitalize upon its poetic power. So much more meaningful is it then, when, in The Prelude (written after his return to the Church of England), Wordsworth asserts an apprehension of God through Nature even more evocative of Acts 17 than “Tintern Abbey”: “With strength, reflecting in its solemn breast/The works of man and face of human life;/And lastly, from its progress have we drawn/The feeling of life endless, the one thought/By which we live, Infinity and God./Imagination having been our theme,/So also hath that intellectual love,/For they are each in each, and cannot stand/Dividually” (Book 13.ll.180-188). The imagination is the faculty by which we access the “rapture of the Hallelujah sent/From all that breathes and is, was chastened, stemmed,/And balanced, by a reason which indeed/I reason duty and pathetic truth” (Prelude, Book 13.ll.261-266). In this world “where man is sphered, and which God animates” (13.268), imaginative meditation upon Nature convicts the mind of the unbeliever without excuse.

Ulmer sees from “Tintern Abbey” to this later poetry a “gradual discovery of the spiritual insufficiency of natural religion,” but I would add that it was the potent if imperfect power of that natural religion which became a central tool for renewing his reconversion to Christian orthodoxy.^[7] While no direct repudiation of the pantheistic language in “Tintern Abbey” exists as far as I am aware, Ulmer posits that Wordsworth’s inability to finish his poetic magnum opus on his earlier Romantic philosophy, The Recluse, was because “it presumed a religious position he continued to find congenial in some respects, but which in other ways he had outgrown.”^[8]

A poem such as “Michael,” for example, seems to corroborate this interpretation: it attempts to apply the consolations of “Tintern Abbey” to a story, and yet the deeply tragic ending seems to sit ill with their efficacy. His subsequent composition of the “Immortality Ode,” which points to a more supernatural comfort than Nature can provide if not seen as flowing from the God who made our souls:

The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star, 
Hath had elsewhere its setting, 
And cometh from afar: 
Not in entire forgetfulness, 
And not in utter nakedness, 
But trailing clouds of glory do we come 
From God, who is our home: 
Heaven lies about us in our infancy! (ll. 59-66) 

From “Tintern Abbey” to “Michael” and then the “Immortality Ode,” we see Wordsworth’s Romanticism beginning to turn more and more to the Church of England. In Christian orthodoxy, Wordsworth’s mature Romanticism finds its home.

One can also find explicit commendations of the Christian Scriptures and the Church of England in Wordsworth’s letters and addresses. For example, he writes, “The blessing of Providence has thus far preserved the Church of England between the shocks to which she has been exposed from those opposite errors…. her doctrines are exclusively scriptural, and her practice is accommodated to the exigencies of our weak nature.”^[9] Elsewhere, in an 1835 address Wordsworth describes the ideal process in a young man preparing to enter the ministry:

It is natural that a boy or youth, with such a prospect before him, should turn his attention to those studies, and be led into those habits of reflection, which will in some degree tend to prepare him for the duties he is hereafter to undertake. As he draws nearer to the time when he will be called to these duties, he is both led and compelled to examine the Scriptures. He becomes more and more sensible of their truth. Devotion grows in him; and what might begin in temporal considerations will end (as in a majority of instances we trust it does) in a spiritual-mindedness not unworthy of that Gospel, the lessons of which he is to teach, and the faith of which he is to inculcate.^[10]

If Hulme would consider such devoted sensibility to the truth of Scripture “damp,” so be it–let the faithful minister be damp.

Coleridge, as noted, rejected his native Anglicanism in favor of Unitarianism for a time. In Biographia Literaria, he recollects being “a zealous Unitarian in religion; more accurately, I was a Psilanthropist, one of those who believe our Lord to have been the real son of Joseph, and who lay the main stress on the resurrection rather than on the crucifixion. O! never can I remember those days with either shame or regret.”^[11] However, his eventual return to orthodoxy is clear in 1816’s Confessio Fidei–an apparently straightforward assertion of Christianity which nonetheless embeds both Romantic ways of thinking into its logic while also tracing out the move from Unitarian to trinitarian in brief.^[12] Coleridge writes, rather without dampness, “I believe, and hold it as the fundamental article of Christianity, that I am a fallen creature; that I am of myself capable of moral evil, but not of myself capable of moral good, and that an evil ground existed in my will, previously to any given act, or assignable moment of time, in my consciousness. I am born a child of wrath” (Article IV). Only one answer will do for this condition: “I receive with full and grateful faith the assurance of revelation, that the Word, which is from all eternity with God, and is God, assumed our human nature in order to redeem me, and all mankind from this our connate corruption” (Article V). As religion goes, this is not very spilled, nor very inclined to confuse man with God. The Confessio also contains a clear confession of trinitarianism. Coleridge similarly defended orthodoxy at length in Aids to Reflection, The Statesman’s Manual, and Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, among others, honing his religious posture as the “Sage of Highgate” in his later years.

As with Wordsworth, the question arises: upon his return to orthodoxy, did Coleridge repudiate his earlier work? In short, no. For one, more heterodox works such as “Religious Musings” were written under the fear of censor and so composed with sufficient plausible deniability that Unitarianism could not be overtly detected. For another, his Biographia Literaria was produced at the same time as the Confessio, and offers no such repudiation, but rather revision. Admittedly, works such as Rime of the Ancient Mariner and others were subjected both to revision and analysis by his own hand even as he was sorting out his identity as an Anglican philosopher, but revision is not the same as repudiation.

Furthermore, it can be shown that even in such a boilerplate confession as Confessio Fidei, undoubtedly Romantic ideas emerge. In the second article of the confessio, he asserts belief in God, and provides this corollary:

The wonderful works of God in the sensible world are a perpetual discourse, reminding me of his existence, and shadowing out to me his perfections. But as all language presupposes in the intelligent hearer or reader those primary notions, which it symbolizes; as well as the power of making those combinations of these primary notions, which it represents and excites us to combine, ­even so I believe, that the notion of God is essential to the human mind; that it is called forth into distinct consciousness principally by the conscience, and auxiliarly by the manifest adaptation of means to ends in the outward creation.

Just as the material substrate of words on the page do not convey the author’s intention without the capacity of the reader to read and mark out meaning with a shared understanding of language, the power of Nature as a language which manifests the glory of God calls a response from the image of divinity housed in the individual. So for Coleridge, God is not found through scientific means any more than authorial intent can be found in the material of ink blots or the digital systems which convey that intent:

It is, therefore, evident to my reason, that the existence of God is absolutely and necessarily insusceptible of a scientific demonstration, and that Scripture has so represented it. For it commands us to believe in one God. I am the Lord thy God: thou shalt have none other gods but me. Now all commandment necessarily relates to the will; whereas all scientific demonstration is independent of the will, and is apodictic or demonstrative only as far as it is compulsory on the mind.

Arguments from intelligent design do not move Coleridge; rather, one might say, it is the poetic design of Nature through which the imagination, as Wordsworth would also contend, can access this insight. So God can speak to Coleridge’s son Hartley through Nature as Coleridge depicts, hopes, and prays will happen in his 1798 “Frost at Midnight,” one of his finest so-called conversation poems:

But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze 
By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags 
Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds, 
Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores 
And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear 
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible 
Of that eternal language, which thy God 
Utters, who from eternity doth teach 
Himself in all, and all things in himself.
Great universal Teacher! he shall mould 
Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask. 

At the writing of these lines Coleridge was a committed, irascible Unitarian who saw Anglican doctrine as party to the totalitarian regime of William Pit’s censorious government. And yet here this classic piece of Romantic sentiment is indistinguishable from the later assertion that the “wonderful works of God in the sensible world are a perpetual discourse.”

Biblical Epistemology and Romantic Theories of Perception

A way one might frame the entire sweep of Coleridge and Wordsworth’s project is to again take seriously, and to restore the imaginative power of, the symbolic power of the Psalms. To modern readers, the Psalms may seem like sermons with symbolism in the way. How are we to contend with the metaphorical hyperbole (is it?) of Psalm 148?

Praise ye the Lord. Praise ye the Lord from the heavens: praise him in the heights. 
Praise ye him, all his angels: praise ye him, all his hosts.
Praise ye him, sun and moon: praise him, all ye stars of light. 
Praise him, ye heavens of heavens, and ye waters that be above the heavens. 

Such natural phenomena no longer resound in modern ears with such easy personification. In The Presence of the Word, Walter Ong points out how our technological prowess has caused us to bottom out in the material of nature and so no longer hear it: “Could it be that God is not silent but that man is relatively deaf, his sensorium adjusted to the post-Newtonian silent universe?”^[13] Perhaps this Jesuit priest forgot to unspill his religion, or perhaps he knew that a heaven and earth full of God’s glory comes with meaning already spilled throughout, a sentiment not different from Wordsworth’s critique of Enlightenment thinking in “The Tables Turned”: “Our meddling intellect/Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things;/–We murder to dissect” (ll.26-28). Such a poem is favored by traditional readers of Wordsworth, who tend to his later writing, yet the beauteous forms of things receive a treatment no less Romantic than Christian in his 1835 “On the Power of Sound”:

Break forth into thanksgiving,
Ye banded Instruments of wind and chords;
Unite, to magnify the Ever-living,
Your inarticulate notes with the voice of words!
…As Deep to Deep
Shouting through one valley calls,
All worlds, all natures, mood and measure keep
For praise and ceaseless gratulation, poured
Into the ear of God, their Lord!

The Enlightenment emphasis on vision as the primary analog, as Ong would have it, receives critique as Wordsworth restores to our perception creation’s hidden notes of the divine voice.

Coleridge expounds this critique in Biographia Literaria, where he denounces “that despotism of the eye” found in David Hartley’s (1705-1757) empiricism (ironically, the same philosopher after whom he named his son). This empiricism puts us “under this strong sensuous influence,” in which “we are restless because invisible things are not the objects of vision.”^[14] In fact, Coleridge lays the foundation of the same critique of materialism later to be found in C. S. Lewis’s Miracles, namely, that if our minds are merely products of our environments then their judgements cannot be trusted. An epistemology built on scientism self-destructs because there is no principle of judgment at work in the thinker, as Coleridge observes: “In Harley’s scheme the soul is present only to be pinched or stroked.” But the act of beholding, for Coleridge, is far too dynamic to be reduced to mental facsimiles of thinking. The imagination must corroborate with Reason and the Senses for there to be agency involved in thought–for a mental calculation has no more self-referential power than a sensory stimulus. Thinking requires imagination; imagination is the province of poetry; to see reality requires, therefore, the poetic perception of the poet. His short poem, “Apologia pro Vita Sua,” makes this very point:

The poet in his lone yet genial hour 
Gives to his eyes a magnifying power: 
Or rather he emancipates his eyes 
From the black shapeless accidents of size— 
In unctuous cones of kindling coal, 
Or smoke upwreathing from the pipe's trim bole, 
His gifted ken can see 
Phantoms of sublimity. 

This depiction, in sum, is what I think Coleridge and Wordsworth believed and what I also regard as the truth of a Christian Romanticism: the imagination’s capacity for interpretation provides an indispensable resource for encountering the world as humans ought to encounter it, and purely scientific or purely philosophical apprehensions of the world are not sufficient for this process. Any theory of reality that does not factor in the fact of interpretation and the fact of interpreters is deficient. “Proof,” empirical evidence or rational argumentation, will never be sufficient to exhaust the need for interpretation.

To the charge that this view opens the door for solipsism, I believe Coleridge and Wordsworth would turn this charge on the Enlightenment, which ensured a solipsism wherein individuals could not see that their imaginations were as much at work as anywhere in a Romantic’s poetry. The notion that reality can be fundamentally interpreted without imagination becomes, for the Christian Romantic, like a husband trying to know his wife by studying her body or her beliefs, but never her status as a real somebody whose self necessarily dwells in both but can be reduced to neither. Such a husband fails, as Wordsworth puts it in the subheading of the eighth book of The Prelude, to use imagination to let the “love of Nature” lead “to Love of Mankind.” Human dignity, in marriage or any other relationship, cannot be had in a purely empiricist framework which interprets only the “dead letter” of the mere sense perception of the human individual treated as “a Block/Or waxen Image which yourselves have made,/And ye adore” (ll.432-6). To see the “sanctity of nature given to man” and to see that “Blessed be the God/Of Nature and of Man,” “the mind/That to devotion willingly would be raised/Into the Temple and the Temple’s heart” (430-1, 469-71) requires an epistemology not to be found in the Enlightenment frameworks of tabula rasa and clear and distinct ideas. Interpretation, therefore, demands interpreters of good will and trustworthy character, or all so-called “reality” of empirical or philosophical study will merely be a fiction of convenience or tyranny.

This is not to say that Coleridge and Wordsworth believed the imagination should be unleashed unfettered. Fundamental to perception, the imagination nonetheless fails to do its work if it is not putting us into deeper contact with the Real. We see this in Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria:

This has been my object, and this alone can be my defence—and O! that with this my personal as well as my LITERARY LIFE might conclude!—the unquenched desire I mean, not without the consciousness of having earnestly endeavoured to kindle young minds, and to guard them against the temptations of scorners, by showing that the scheme of Christianity, as taught in the liturgy and homilies of our Church, though not discoverable by human reason, is yet in accordance with it; that link follows link by necessary consequence; that Religion passes out of the ken of Reason only where the eye of Reason has reached its own horizon; and that Faith is then but its continuation: even as the day softens away into the sweet twilight, and twilight, hushed and breathless, steals into the darkness.^[15]

Is such a view that Faith is the logical continuation past the limits of Reason a Romantic view, or the view of the orthodox Christian who submits to the apophatic heights of a God whose ways are higher than our ways? The answer is both:

It is night, sacred night! the upraised eye views only the starry heaven which manifests itself alone: and the outward beholding is fixed on the sparks twinkling in the awful depth, though suns of other worlds, only to preserve the soul steady and collected in its pure act of inward adoration to the great I AM, and to the filial WORD that re-affirmeth it from eternity to eternity, whose choral echo is the universe.^[16]

When imagination is divorced from the eye of Reason, the fullness of consciousness that puts us in touch with experience is lost. This is true both in nature and in human nature, but it is perhaps even more true as regards the supernatural. If we cannot muster enough imagination to see wonder in trees, flowers, and rainbows; in human smiles, struggles, and triumphs; then the attempt to reach higher and meet with our imaginations the God who is sovereign over both nature and human nature can only be helplessly frustrated. The reconciliation of faith and reason is not to reduce faith to reason, but to elevate reason to the brink, to see that to be fully rational is to admit for horizons of the sublime that reason can glimpse but not capture.

Conclusion: Buckets are Images of Wells

I would like to propose an amended metaphor to Hulme’s depiction of Romanticism, or at least the Christian Romanticism of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Rather than a well or a bucket per se, I would like to say that for the Christian Romantic the poet is the well’s bucket. If we imagined a bucket with personality at the brink of the well, we could imagine that bucket afraid and awed by the circle of darkness at the well’s opening, unsure of what resides at the bottom. By bravely crossing that threshold and descending into the depths where the currents of inspiration flow, the bucket becomes well-like, and in fact treats the well as a sort of earthen bucket which gives shape to the search for meaning which mirrors its own. Like the philosopher emerging from Plato’s Cave, the bucket emerges with water as an emissary of the well. And yet the darkness is not simply to be escaped, but is also the resource of refreshment which others desire.

The bucket could also be said to function similarly to the imagination for both poets. In our daylight life outside of the well, we require refreshment. As the bucket on a rope can descend into the hidden waters of the well, so the imagination can extend to those experiences just outside of our immediate rational grasp and put us in touch with what we need for life. How can we return to a biblical epistemology if we stay in the daylight certainty of reason which treats human perception as the final analysis? For Coleridge and Wordsworth, cultivating the imagination helps us to remember two things: First, we do not simply see the world around us, but have to develop patterns of perception which make sight possible. Second, and by extension, in desiring not to overreach and usurp God’s place, we must also be careful not to erase the implications of humanity as bearing God’s image. The implications of this truth relate to our imaginations as well as to our capacities for sensory and rational knowledge. If we are to see the world as the psalmist sees, we must remember that perception itself requires imagination, so that in nature and human nature at once we can glimpse patterns of divine creativity. And above that, we can see God’s Word afresh, to restore wonder at revelation as that which will require the full extent of our faculties–our imaginations included–to grasp, to learn, and to inwardly digest.

Anthony Cirilla is a Lecturer at Davenant Hall and an Associate Professor of English at College of the Ozarks.

1. T.E. Hulme, “Romanticism and Classicism,” 187-189 IN The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume D: The Romantic Period, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, 10th ed. (Norton: London, 2018) 187-189. ↑

2. Hulme, “Romanticism and Classicism,” 188. ↑

3. Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution (Wheaton: Crossway, 2020), 131-138. ↑

4. See William Ulmer’s 2001 The Christian Wordsworth, 1798-1805, and Luke S.H. Wright’s 2010 Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Anglican Church, for detailed expositions of their respective faith journeys. ↑

5. Stephen Ulmer, The Christian Wordsworth: 1798-1805 (New YorkL State University of New York Press, 2001), 37. ↑

6. William Wordsworth, “Letter to the Rev. H. (Afterwards Dean) Alford, 1848, in The Prose works of William Wordsworth. ↑

7. Ulmer, Christian Wordsworth, 34. ↑

8. Ulmer, Christian Wordsworth, 82. ↑

9. William Wordsworth, “V. Of the Catholic Relief Bill,” 1829, in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, vol. 1, I. Political, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/16550/16550-h/16550-h.htm. Poetry is found in Stephen Gill’s anthology, William Wordsworth: The Major Works, including The Prelude. ↑

10. William Wordsworth, “I. Of Legislation for the Poor, the Working Class, and the Clergy: Appendix to Poems,” 1835. The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, vol. 1: II. Ethical. ↑

11. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, Ch. X. ↑

12. This text can be found at the end of Coleridge’s Literary Remains, https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/8488/pg8488-images.html#section157. ↑

13. Walter J. Ong, The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981), 16. ↑

14. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria in Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Major Works, ed. H.J. Jackson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 213. ↑

15. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, Ch. XXIV. ↑

16. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, Ch. XXIV. ↑