"The Naked Gospel": Varieties of American religious poetry from Richard Henry Dana to Herman Melville
Item
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Title
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"The Naked Gospel": Varieties of American religious poetry from Richard Henry Dana to Herman Melville
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:755df0b26e8a:10199
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identifier
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10363
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Creator
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McCullough, Mark A.,
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Contributor
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David S. Reynolds
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Date
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2009
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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American literature | Herman Melville | James Russell Lowell | John Greenleaf Whittier | Religious Poetry | Richard Henry Dana | William James
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Abstract
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"'The Naked Gospel': Varieties of American Religious Poetry, From Richard Henry Dana to Herman Melville" examines the term "religious" in nineteenth-century America poetry. Without ignoring the enormous influence of European and British Romanticisms, it positions a rich but neglected body of nineteenth-century American religious verse vis-a-vis American commentary and criticism of the period. It surveys attempts by nineteenth-century American editors and writers to collect and represent a native religious verse and outlines the standards by which an American poem was judged as "religious." These judgments, my study argues, reflect how deeply rooted Romantic thought had become in American denominational identity, even before the influence of Emerson on American culture was widespread, and reveal the extent to which temperament, not theology, was the shared interpretive frame for the selection, as well as the production, of American religious poetry.;In light of these views of the period's interpenetration of Romantic thought and American religious identity, my study examines further the verse of three Americans who were identified by their contemporaries as "religious" poets: the contemplative verse of Calvinist-Romantic Richard Henry Dana, the devotional lyrics of Quaker John Greenleaf Whittier, and "The Cathedral," James Russell Lowell's poem which, in narrating a pilgrimage to Chartres, depicts the collision between the ecclesiastical imagination of Anglo-Catholic poetics and the iconoclasm of modern skepticism. Selected for their commitment to an established faith-tradition (Calvinism, Quakerism) or, in the case of "The Cathedral," a recognizable "indebtedness to the faith...eschewed" (Anglo-Catholicism), these religious poems resist the dichotomy between tradition and insight, or the easy passage from doctrine to imagination, and seek insight through available forms of Christian tradition, though not without great difficulty.;In keeping with the desire to discuss nineteenth-century American religious verse within an American context, I call upon William James, whose work Varieties of Religious Experience supplies my study with a critical vocabulary, a structure, and an interpretive frame. Like the religious anthologies outlined in my introduction, James' discussion of religious experience is a compendium of Christian temperaments not theologies, "ways of feeling" religious, not "spiritual." Two of these temperaments, "the sick soul," and "mysticism," along with what James identified as the twin ends of the "ecclesiastical system" and "naked gospel scheme," provide a structure for my study's individual chapters.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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English
