Poetry, Liturgy, Spontaneity

More grist for the discussion of Protestantism and writing, taken from my review of Lori Branch,Rituals of Spontaneity. See the whole review here.

Focusing on English literary culture and religion, Branch examines the formation of an “ideology of spontaneity” from the Reformation attacks on ritual through Puritan defenses of free prayer to the Romantic poetry of William Wordsworth. She demonstrates that the anti-ritual attitude is a central theme in the formation of modern views of religion, subjectivity, morality, and literature.

The “ideology of spontaneity” is more explicitly expressed in the early part of this history. English Protestants attacked the ceremonies of the Catholic Church and the remnants of ceremony in Prayer Book liturgies, not only because they thought these ceremonies lacked biblical support but also because they believed that set liturgical forms were, in themselves, inimical to religious sincerity. This had the effect of detaching believers from communal actions. Medieval Christians were participants in rituals; after the Reformation, Christians began to see themselves as detached individual selves, desperately ginning up religious passion.

The ideology of spontaneity affected not only moral philosophy, but also literary culture, in the form of the “literature of sensibility.” Drawing from earlier religious and philosophical themes, this literature recommended, in literary scholar M. H. Abrams’s words, “a hair-trigger responsiveness to another person’s distresses and joys” and “an intense emotional responsiveness to beauty and sublimity, whether in nature or art.”

For Branch, the literature of sensibility is as compromised by commercialization as the ideology of spontaneity. The publishing house of John Newbery (whose name has been given to a children’s fiction award) combined what Branch sees as an unholy mix of profit, piety, and politeness as it marketed books promoting moral and religious improvement.

Both Oliver Goldsmith and Christopher Smart worked for Newbery, and both aimed to reform a literary culture captive, as they saw it, to sentimentality and commercialization. Goldsmith recognized the problem, but his attempt at reform in the Vicar of Wakefield is, on Branch’s terms, unsuccessful because the book is compromised by its own latent sentimentality and subservience to commercial interests.

Goldsmith knew that the literature of sensibility could only be challenged by rituals of daily life that could cultivate true sentiment and piety. Though Goldsmith tells us that his fictional vicar participates in such rituals—family Bible reading, daily prayer, common meals, work, and rest—these rituals never come to the surface of the novel. If they did, the novel would cease to be a novel, and it would violate the unwritten laws of decorum that control what gets depicted in novels.

A Cosmic Liturgy

Smart is a different story. Notoriously sent to an asylum for his practice of spontaneous prayer, Smart’s own experience demonstrates the inner contradictions of the culture formed by the ideology of spontaneity. English culture increasingly celebrated spontaneous poetic inspiration, yet Smart’s confinement shows that spontaneity was limited, sometimes coercively, by the demands of rational propriety. Modern English culture both encourages and confines spontaneous expression, just as it simultaneously encourages and confines religious expression of all sorts.

While confined, Smart wrote his great unfinished masterpiece, Jubilate Agno. Written in the form of a litany, Jubilate Agno thoroughly challenges the sentimentality and commercialization against which Goldsmith only weakly protests.

In part, Smart’s success is dependent on the circumstances of his poem. After suffering a nearly mortal fever, Smart determined to write only for the Lord, not for money. Apparently never intended for publication, the Jubilate literally breaks free of commercial confinement of religion, the tendency to write only what is commercially viable.

In content, the Jubilate, furthermore, self-consciously opposes the ideology of spontaneity. Instead of treating prayer as an immediate expression of the soul, Smart sees prayer as a “foundry” in which the soul is molded and “tuned” to sing God’s praises. Smart explicitly endorses liturgical worship as a means for shaping the worshiper to worship, a fact evident in the very form of the Jubilate.

And Smart refuses to accept the confinement of religious expression to private spaces. The poem is a cosmic liturgy, calling on every creature to join in praising God. The breadth of Smart’s concerns is beautifully encapsulated in the line, “For there is nothing but it may be played upon in delight.”

Wordsworth’s Questions & Answers

Wordsworth makes a fitting capstone to Branch’s book. He introduced a new age of “expressive” poetics in the “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads,which became the manifesto of English Romanticism. In Branch’s view, however, Wordsworth is not a proponent of the ideology of spontaneity. Many interpreters suggest that Wordsworth’s poetry slowly cools from the radicalism of the early poems to the complacent conservatism of his final works. Branch claims, on the contrary, thatall of Wordsworth’s poetry is an effort to probe the weaknesses of the ideology of spontaneity and a search for an alternative account of moral knowledge, human agency, and religion.

Lyrical Ballads reflects Wordsworth’s obsession with the problem of cultivating a moral life and aesthetic sense within a commercialized and sentimentalized culture. The “Preface” reproves the infusion of economic values into English habits of reading; readers seek novelty just as much as consumers in the marketplace. The poems pose similar questions. In several poems in Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth recognizes the inherent egotism of the inward turn of sentimentality. Reflecting on the French Revolution, he wonders how people striving for good can end up doing so much evil.

At this point, he has more questions than answers. But by the time he writes Ecclesiastical Sonnets, a series of 132 poems on English religious history, he has discovered something like a solution. Increasingly aware of the limits of human certainty, he recognizes that faith is inherent in all human action—a faith that acts without absolute certainty about the good or evil of the action or its consequences.

He answers the puzzle of the French Revolution by noting the human propensity for “daring sympathies with power,” and he has come to see the continuity between the violence of the Ego’s search for absolute certainty and its political expression in Terror.

Double Agency

The problem of human agency is a central point in Branch’s treatment of Wordsworth. The problem arises directly from the ideology of spontaneity, for which valuable human action must be an autonomous expression of the individual. If he has been influenced in any way, the sincerity of his action is vitiated. Yet we know that we are subject to all sorts of influences that we don’t control. Is there a way to account for the freedom of human action while also acknowledging the reality, and the legitimacy, of those influences? Wordsworth wants to connect morality to emotional responses, but is equally interested in how these responses can be shaped.

Wordsworth’s answer turns back to the original concerns of Branch’s book, for he finds in liturgy a form of double agency, in which human acts are free yet not autonomous. Liturgy also is the site for the formation of moral agents. The repetitive acts of daily ritual and the ritualized prayers of the Church cultivate love. In the repetitive acts of daily rituals, moral beliefs are, Wordsworth claims, shaped as beliefs.

Wordsworth’s turn to liturgy is not, as many have suggested, a retreat into a safe zone of privacy. Rather, Wordsworth comes to see spiritual practice as the basis for a constructive politics, the ground for resistance to the solvents of commercialized culture.