‘Sacred calling’: Romantic Authorship Models, Wordsworth, Emerson, and Beyond

Prof. Dr. Günter Leypoldt (Universität Heidelberg)

At around 1800 literary intellectuals become increasingly fascinated by the idea that writing poetry should be about having extraordinary powers of ontological vision and a “higher language” no less revelatory of transcendence than theological speculation. Prof. Leypoldt exemplifies this view by comparing Wordsworth’s ambitious “Recluse Project” with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s shift from a minister in church to a “minister of song” (Coleridge). The key question for Wordsworth and Emerson is not whether they should apply themselves to the “field of religion” or “the field of a secular art” (as twentieth-century secularism has liked to frame the issue) but rather whether they will find ways of having authentic ontological visions as opposed to merely repeating former generation’s visions grown into pseudo-sacred dogmas.

Prof. Leypoldt wishes to explore how the discourse of “sacred vocation” comes under pressure if we move from the network of “sage-writers” (Coleridge, Emerson, Fuller, Thoreau, Arnold, Ruskin) to the network of high-cultural “journalist novelists” (Dickens, Bulwer-Lytton, Disraeli, Trollope, Thackeray, George Eliot, William Dean Howells, Henry James), a parallel literary universe in Anglophone letters whose vocabularies of secular realism reject the romantic blurring of artistic and religious issues. His emphasis on networks wishes to complicate simplistic narratives of temporal succession (romantic art-religion “succeeded” by mid-century secular realism).

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