ABSTRACT
This chapter considers what William Wordsworth’s individual spiritual vision may have owed to the cultural influence of evangelism and to Methodism in particular. It looks at Wordsworth’s likely exposure to Methodist itinerancy within the context of his childhood, his university education and early poetic career, and assess, from the evidence of written and spoken responses, his receptivity to its discourse. Wordsworth was eventually to judge Godwin’s rationalist atheistic creed as untenable, and also increasingly distanced himself from Rational Dissent through disillusionment with the cerebral, speculative nature of Unitarianism. A contrary interpretation of the emphasis of Wordsworth’s statement might read it less as a socially inflected embarrassment than as a somewhat anxious defence of the capacity of emotional revelation to challenge intellectual doubt or rationally authoritative creeds. Wordsworth’s personal library later contained a copy of Taylor’s The Natural History of Enthusiasm and Fanaticism, which indicates a persistent interest in the culture of enthusiasm.
