Wordsworth says that poetry can never be felt or rightly estimated
"without love of human nature and reverence for God," [Footnote: Letter
to Lady Beaumont, May 21, 1807.] because poetry and religion are of the
same nature. If religion proclaims cosmos against chaos, so also does
poetry, and both derive the harmony and repose that inspire reverence
from this power of revelation.
But, the puritan objects, the overweening pride which is one of the
poet's most distinctive traits renders impossible the humility of spirit
characteristic of religious reverence.
It is true that the poet repudiates a religion that humbles him; this is
one of the strongest reasons for his pantheistic leanings.
There is no God, O son!
If thou be none,
[Footnote: _On the Downs._]
Swinburne represents nature as crying to man, and this suits the poet
exactly. Perhaps Swinburne's prose shows more clearly than his poetry
the divergence of the puritan temper and the poetical one in the matter
of religious humility. "We who worship no material incarnation of any
qualities," he wrote, "no person, may worship the Divine Humanity; the
ideal of human perfection and aspiration, without worshipping any god,
any person, any fetish at all.
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