| Summary: | "New lyric forms are not as plentiful as blackberries, and when one turns up, it is worth critical attention." This imperative is as true today as when M. H. Abrams wrote it some decades ago. It is especially true for criticism of new nineteenth-century lyric forms, which, like the conversation poem and the dramatic monologue, continue to be misunderstood, or, like the roundel, almost completely ignored, because critics overlook a crucial context. At the core of this dissertation is the argument that for three major nineteenth-century English poets, religious faith motivates poetic form. In the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Browning, and Christina Rossetti, particular beliefs about God and about the divine in man, in the church, in nature, and in history critically shaped some of the period's most innovative lyric forms.
The essential connection between form and faith has been obscured by the "loss of faith" narrative of modernity, a story about which literary and cultural historians have become increasingly skeptical. By turning to the varieties of belief among the Dissenting, Low, Broad, and High Church movements in Romantic, Victorian, and Fin-de-siecle Britain, this project offers an account of nineteenth-century Protestant poetics that is indispensable to understanding the period's broader literary and intellectual trends. This approach begins from a formal question: why were certain poetic forms generated by or appealing to certain poets? The answer, the project argues, lies in the particularities of the poets' theological commitments, liturgical practices, and ways of knowing and perceiving the divine. Coleridge's accomplishments in the conversation poem and the ode are essentially informed by his Unitarian beliefs; the dramatic monologue depends on evangelical epistemologies and contemporary biblical hermeneutics; and Rossetti's use of the roundel form reveals her understanding that generosity and abundance characterize not only God and communal religious ritual, but also poetry. Though close attention to instances like these, the project demonstrates the compelling extent to which religious faith motivates literary form in the period.
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