Poetic Theology: Dante And The British Romantic Poets

This dissertation follows the figure of Dante as a vehicle to chart a new literary history of poetic theology that discovers the Romantic revival of the Renaissance ideal of the poet-theologian. The Italian humanist conception of the poeta theologus, which retroactively named a tradition originating with Dante, sought to resolve the ongoing conflict between theology and poetry. Renaissance writers argued that theology is poetry about God, and that classical poetry, when read allegorically, is consonant with revealed Christianity. Like the humanists who turned to theology to justify poetry, the Romantics, responding to the Enlightenment imperative of truth, re-establish the model of poetic theology in order to defend poetry and its truth. This dissertation seeks to uncover a Romantic poetic theology that demonstrates the implicitly theological basis of late 18th and early 19th-century poetic form and theory. Each chapter begins with a conceptual link to Dante that frames an examination of poetic appropriation and implication of theological questions, including notions of form, language, inspiration, and allegory. Following a theoretical discussion of the function of poetic theology, Chapter One argues that Wordsworth's Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, while reiterating Dante's vernacular poetic program, conceives of the vernacularization of poetic language as an incarnational process mirroring the descent of the divine vernacular, Christ as Word-made-flesh. Chapter Two asserts Byron's use of exile, particularly in his neglected poem, "The Prophecy of Dante," as a biographical trope characterizing the human underside of the experience of poetic inspiration. Chapter Three contends that in Prometheus Unbound, Shelley emulates Dante's bold appropriation of the "allegory of the theologians," inscribing in the poem a fourfold allegorical structure. Chapter Four demonstrates Shelley's revision of Dante's poetic theology of love through his own figural Beatrice in The Cenci. Rather than viewing literary appropriations of biblical and theological resources as a simple process of secularization, this dissertation examines the very fact of poetry's consistent effort to draw itself alongside scripture to identify the working of poetic theology-poetry's self assertion as a theological modality.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph. D., English Language and Literature

Level thesis:degree_level

Doctor of Philosophy

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

English Language and Literature

Grantor

Cornell University

Year dc:date.issued

2015

Author dc:creator

• Kim, Jane

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Goldstein, Amanda Jo
• Gilbert, Roger Stephen

• Romantic poets
• poetry and theology
• poetry and Bible
• Dante

Language dc:language.iso

en_US

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1813/39352

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:ecommons.cornell.edu:1813/39352