ABSTRACT
This introductory section of the book draws attention to a curious statistical detail, namely the fact that in Wordsworth’s collected Poetical Works allusions to religious belief will be found more commonly than references to almost all “typically Wordsworthian” themes, such as childhood, or low and rustic life, liberty, or poetry. More than every second poem Wordsworth wrote and published in his lifetime includes allusions to God (immanent or transcendent), or to Heaven, Providence, the Virgin Mary, the Church—or churches (and chapels, temples, cathedrals, monasteries, abbeys, convents, shrines)—or/and pastors and priests (and nuns), and crowds of praying laymen, male and female, old and young, etc. This tendency of Wordsworth’s verse to take up such themes and motifs was recognized by his contemporaries (this point is supported by evidence collected by Stephen Gill), and it has likewise been acknowledged in later criticism (this is illustrated with extensive lists of the twentieth- and twenty-first century monographs focused on Wordsworth’s religious attitudes). The intriguing feature of these writings is their authors’ ability to read the poet’s oeuvre in completely contradictory terms. The Presence of God in the Works of William Wordsworth contributes to this ongoing debate by pointing to a range of textual (thematic, structural, stylistic) features which occur in the poet’s writings with phenomenal regularity, and which make it so easy for his commentators to “construct” Wordsworth—or else, to construct from Wordsworth whatever answers his critics’ needs.
