ABSTRACT
This introductory section defines the range, theme and approach of the book. Based on Wordsworth’s entire poetic oeuvre, The Absent God in the Works of William Wordsworth draws attention to a feature which has not been noted in critical literature, namely, the fact that the God of whom Wordsworth writes in his poetry is always ABSENT. Around half a thousand of the poems he composed and published in his lifetime contain references to belief. Yet, the God whom he strives to locate in his verse constantly evades the Author—regardless of the perspective (the Past, the Future, or the Present) from which the Wordsworthian “I” endeavours to approach Him/him/it. These untiring attempts to approach God place Wordsworth at a large distance from the atheistic and truly secularized Second-Generation Romantics and their followers. On the other hand, what clearly puts him on a path that, in the long run, leads to Shelley or Keats, is the fact that all his religious discourse turns out to be a record of his encounters with Absence. Wordsworth is the first English poet of major significance whose oeuvre includes such a record. At the same time, he is probably the last major English poet who struggled to come to terms with his own—and his epoch’s—religious crisis by tirelessly endeavouring to (re)present the Absence. Included in the Preface is also a reflection on the overall methodology of this work, which I characterize as “post-deconstructive humanist constructivism.”
