Surprised by Hope: Possibilities of Spiritual Experience in Victorian Lyric Poetry
Religions February 25, 2025 Peer reviewed DOI: 10.3390/rel16020255 via DOAJ
Summary
The article explores how literature, particularly Victorian poetry, can express and evoke spiritual experiences, drawing on William James's ideas about mysticism. It analyzes poems by Thomas Hardy, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Dollie Radford to demonstrate how these works encourage a broader understanding of hope and revelation. The study suggests that engaging with poetry can lead to unexpected insights, challenging the traditional dichotomy between faith and doubt.
Study at a glance
| Population | Victorian lyric poems and their authors |
|---|---|
| Key finding | Victorian poetry facilitates a re-imagination of hope and reframes revelation as an invitation rather than a proclamation. |
Abstract
This article reconsiders literature’s capacity to express and evoke spiritual experiences by turning to William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, especially his discussion of mysticism and his suggestion that poetry can bring about such states. James’s ideas are especially promising given recent developments in postsecular and postcritical scholarship that problematize a religious/secular divide and call into question a hermeneutics of suspicion. Bringing James into conversation with Paul Ricoeur, I aim to show how receptivity to spiritual experiences in literature might generate expansive models of both poetics and hermeneutics. To pursue these possibilities, my study analyzes three examples of Victorian lyric poems that probe the edges of wonder: Thomas Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush”, Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Nondum” and Dollie Radford’s “A Dream of ‘Dreams’”. These case studies strategically select work by writers of various belief or unbelief positions, highlighting the dynamism of the late nineteenth-century moment from which James’s writings emerged. I argue that this poetry facilitates a re-imagination of hope, beyond a faith/doubt dichotomy, as well as a re-framing of revelation, from proclamation to invitation. Building on insights from both James and Ricoeur, my discussion concludes by making the case for cultivating an interpretive disposition that does not guard against but opens toward poetry’s latent potential to take readers by surprise.