‘This prayer I make’

This chapter evokes William Wordsworth as a poet indebted to the theological mainstream. However, the delicately allusive and non-dogmatic religious texture of his work is an awkward context in which to pray, the latter implying a strong performative commitment of the ‘I’. Direct address of the kind found in many other poets would break this texture. As such, Wordsworthian devotions become hesitant, reflexive, and oblique: the language and tone of prayer is pervasive, but allowing his poetic ‘I’ to utter a direct prayer is almost always avoided. This is nowhere more true than in the Snowdon episode of The Prelude (analysed comparatively in the 1805 and 1850 versions), which is underpinned by what contemporaries would recognize as the spirit of prayer: a habitual disposition of piety underlying the self which may not necessarily need expression as concrete, verbal, or conscious acts of prayer.

Introduction

The Introduction lays out the relevance of prayer as an area of enquiry, noting that its quintessential position as an act of religious subjectivity means that it responds to the historical conditions of modernity and secularity in a different way from more objective phenomena like theology, denominational structures, or patterns of conceptual belief. It is noted that whilst Romanticist scholarship has always analysed the question of Romantic religion, it has overwhelmingly tended to do so through these objective contexts: this is all the more surprising when the deep historical and formal affinity of poetry (especially lyric poetry) to prayer is recognized. The Introduction concludes by laying out the basic thesis of this work: that poets used poetry as a uniquely positioned space to explore, critique, and even reinvent prayer in modernity.

‘Hence the necessity of Prayer’

Samuel Taylor Coleridge began as a Unitarian: this chapter charts the poetic emergence, in his work, of a stranger and more disturbing sense of prayer than Rational Dissent could conceive. Pushing at the borders of reason—slightly archaic and opening the self to mysterious otherness—Gothic prayers become something of a Coleridgean obsession in the late 1790s, in poems like ‘Christabel’ and ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. The attempt to understand prayer as an experience beyond the shallowly rational version of it which Coleridge inherits from Unitarian thought continues, and culminates in his 1820s Kantian-influenced philosophy of prayer, which is reconstructed from notebook entries and other fragmentary materials.

‘The solitary saint walks forth to meditate at even-tide’

This chapter illustrates a strong connection between prayer and what I term radical interiority—a self defined by the authenticity of a supposed depth or secrecy—across the work of Evangelical poet William Cowper. Expressing this inward and grace-filled self is always accompanied by and conceived on the model of intense prayer; by contrast, prayerlessness equals spiritual desolation. The connection is particularly torturous in melancholic early texts such as Adelphi (his spiritual autobiography) and the Olney Hymns. In his most famous poem The Task, a poetics interlinking prayer and interiority continues: despite an initial elision in favour of hymning the natural world and focusing outside the self, it is reasserted through a quietist turn. Cowper’s final praying self retreats from the world, meditatively into itself but also in occupying hidden physical spaces as prayer closets, a combination inspired by his translations of French mystic, Madame de Guyon.

Conclusion

This chapter considers the legacy of the Romantic rethinking of prayer, with a particular focus on the Victorian period which immediately follows. The inflections of prayer explored by all the poets discussed in this study—from the identifiably religious to the staunchly sceptical—are shown to have Victorian afterlives, ranging from James Martineau and Barbauld to Swinburne and Keats. An even wider legacy interlinking the poetic with the theological is apparent in the Tractarian revival and the richness of Victorian devotional verse. Looking forward to the barer and more uncertain prayerful poetry of the twentieth century and beyond, the chapter asserts the pivotal importance of Romantic prayer.

‘Till all my sense is lost in infinite’

This chapter traces Anna Letitia Barbauld’s long-standing project to reassert an emotional aspect to Rational Dissenting prayer, which threatened to slip into sterilely intellectual contemplation. However, evoking various affective legacies relevant to Dissenting sensibility—from Isaac Watts to Edward Young—creates poems that struggle to reconcile the competing pulls of reason and passion. Whilst a scene she inherits from the thought of the Unitarian theologian Joseph Priestley—the solitary intellect meditating silently on the sublimity of the divine—overhangs her work, she moves increasingly beyond it. She experiments with greater degrees of affect in both verse and prose hymns, and the chapter concludes by examining a final Barbauldian understanding of the emotions of prayer as intrinsically social and intersubjective.

‘Too late for antique vows’

This chapter reads John Keats in the context of the influence of Leigh Hunt and the wider radical Enlightenment. One problem posed by a secular modernity is whether prayer—and forms of religious practice more generally—can be maintained as part of an increasingly abstracted philosophical religion that exits the form of Christianity. Circles of elegy, nostalgia, and scepticism pose this problem of a ‘post-Christian’ prayer. In ‘Ode to Psyche’, Keats tries to imagine a prayer detached from Christianity’s mournful theology; in the Catholic and Gothic tones of ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’, he is repeatedly drawn by the seductive lure of superstition and the rich concrete forms of devotion. The chapter concludes by reading ‘The Fall of Hyperion’ as stylizing a scene of prayer to Moneta, a goddess embodying the uncertain transitions between religious epochs, thus dramatizing his most pressing spiritual dilemma.

The Theology of Prayer

This chapter is archivally based: it lays out three broad traditions of thinking about prayer that were developed across the eighteenth century and inherited by the Romantics, drawing on sermons, essays, polemics, guides to prayer, and other genres of religious print culture. The mainstream tradition, associated with Anglicanism, is ‘reasonable devotion’, which attempts to give a pragmatic account of prayer as a duty and a discipline of self. Elements of this were extended in the rationalist tradition, which attempted to exorcise the archaic and supernatural overtones of prayer and ended up challenging some of its key elements (e.g. address to God, petition). Finally, the Evangelical Revival espoused an emotionally intense, transformational idea of prayer as the soul’s most fundamental voice of joy and despair. The chapter concludes by reviewing prayer, as an idea, on the cusp of the Romantic era.

‘Unlike the God of human Error’

This chapter sets off from the nature of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron as so-called atheist poets. What occurs to the historical and aesthetic affinity between poetry and prayer when prayer is abandoned as a viable language? For Shelley, the crucial thing is to position prayer as a political act. This chapter’s readings trace how he tries to move beyond a bleak connection between prayer and a theology implying a despotic and monarchical deity towards rehabilitating prayer as an act of love. For Byron, his own torn and troubled relation to religion finds expression in the prayerful prayerlessness of his anti-heroes, figures who reject prayer, but also cannot help but mimic or parody prayerful states. The analysis ends with an alternative devotional piety embodied in the figure of Adah, the heroine of Byron’s poetic drama of exile and rebellion, Cain.