ABSTRACT
In her penetrating and sensitive reading of the poetry of Wordsworth and Keats in The Questioning Presence, Susan Wolfson associates the poets’ use of a language of seeming – by which I mean structures such as ‘to seem’, ‘to appear’, ‘as if’ and the like – with what she describes as the ‘interrogative mode’, which she more generally contends is fundamental to the major poems of English Romanticism. 1 Whilst acknowledging the illuminating brilliance of Wolfson’s close reading, I wish in this chapter to suggest, against the thrust of her general thesis, that the language of seeming may serve more than one master, and that such advertised avoidance of the copula may have a variety of motivations which are unaccounted for by her argument. More specifically, I wish to suggest that the language of seeming – even where it may be said to serve an interrogative purpose or indicate a contradiction or lacuna – need not be a sign of indeterminacy or agnosticism, or signal a reservation at the expense of the assertion, but may, on the contrary, be a sign of faith and form part of a fundamentally religious logic. Whilst I shall in this chapter focus on the poetry of Wordsworth, the general argument it puts forward obviously has implications for other Romantic writers. In elaborating this hypothesis, I shall appeal to orthodox Judeo-Christian resources – in particular, the writings of Anselm, Buber and Newman – though these will be invoked alongside the work of a number of contemporary theological writers and will form part of an emphatically postmodern engagement with Romantic writing. I draw attention to this at the outset not because I think such an approach requires any special apology or forewarning but because, at least in the present climate, to do so constitutes a sort of argument in itself.
