Words and the Word

I take my title from the 1986 monograph in which Stephen Prickett launched his attack on M.H. Abrams’s contention that Romanticism might best be understood as an episode in the centuries-long process of secularisation in the course of which literature, together with philosophy and science, won freedom from the oppressive suzerainty of theology. ¹ For Prickett, Romanticism, at least as it is practised by Wordsworth and Coleridge, is better explained as an indication of religious revival than decline. Other contributors to this volume are collaborators in an experiment to determine whether Prickett’s argument might be extended to Byron, who has often been considered the most secular of the Romantic poets. But the volume could not represent an adequate account of Romanticism, nor an appropriate tribute to the lifetime’s work of Bernard Beatty, if it did not make room for a dissentient voice or two.