Recent scholarship on the British Romantic poet William Wordsworth usually depicts him as a secular humanist during the years of his creative ascendancy. In The Christian Wordsworth, 1798-1805, William A. Ulmer challenges this consensus by arguing that Wordsworth never abandoned his faith in a supernatural Deity and that the poet's theism included important Christian sympathies as early as 1798. By tracing the changes in Wordsworth's religious beliefs--from the early secular period to the later Anglican period--Ulmer reconstructs the strategic indirections by which the poet's faith shapes his...
Recent scholarship on the British Romantic poet William Wordsworth usually depicts him as a secular humanist during the years of his creative ascendan...
In this work William Ulmer boldly advances our understanding of Shelley's concept of love by exploring eros as a figure for the poet's political and artistic aspirations. Applying a combination of deconstructive, historicist, and psychoanalytic approaches to six major poems, Ulmer follows the logic of the writing's rhetoric of love by tracing links between such elements as imagination, eros, metaphor, allegory, mirroring, repetition, death, and narcissism. Ulmer takes the mutual desire of self and antitype as a paradigm for rhetorical and social relations throughout Shelley and, in a...
In this work William Ulmer boldly advances our understanding of Shelley's concept of love by exploring eros as a figure for the poet's political an...