ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the presence of God and religious discourse in Wordsworth’s prose writings, taking into account all of the author’s essays, prefaces and appendices, notes and notices (including the Fenwick Notes), as well as eight volumes of his letters written during 1790–1845. A curious regularity which transpires from these extensive and varied materials is that Wordsworth as a prose writer has a tendency to bring up the subject of religion exclusively in three contexts: politics, death, and poetry. The God of the poet’s prose writings practically never assumes one of the chief roles He plays in his verse: that of the keeper of the natural world. Considering Wordsworth’s references to religion in the context of poetry, a striking feature is that they occur almost exclusively in his private prose—most often, when he must defend his verse against adverse criticism. Other than that, religion is not invoked when Wordsworth the prose writer is not provoked. This is especially visible in the prefaces he wrote to his poems, which are almost totally devoid of religious reflection. Dozens of poems collected in, for example, Lyrical Ballads, or in the Poems of 1815, or numerous long passages in The Excursion refer to belief. Wordsworth’s “poetic mind” (Aubrey de Vere’s formulation) needed religious faith to compose these works, but his “prose mind” does not need it to introduce them, define his objectives as a poet, or explain his principles.
