A Harvard dissertation is offering a radical rethinking of what poetry does—and why it matters.
The author, whose research at Harvard formed the basis for this course, argues that poetry doesn't merely describe spiritual experience like a document might record events. Instead, it formally transmits that experience through the very structure of verse. This theory—called spiritual poetics—challenges the Enlightenment's rational, materialistic understanding of the human mind that still dominates literary criticism.
The course will examine how Wordsworth's most celebrated lyric poems encode transformations of consciousness that scholars have long categorized as "spiritual" but struggled to articulate. The lectures are designed for non-academics curious about close reading and romantic poetry, though they'll move faster than typical popular content.
What Spiritual Poetics Means
At its core, spiritual poetics is a theory of how poetry is composed and received—not just what it says, but how it works. The author draws on Helen Vendler's insight that poems are enactments of mobile consciousness. When readers experience a poem, they undergo an ordering of understanding through the poem itself.
This becomes clearest in the Romantic poets: Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley. Their work is deeply associated with states of consciousness that should be called spiritual—ecstasis, experiences of transcendence. But the vocabulary available to discuss this comes from the Enlightenment's rational inheritance, and criticism has been slow to develop language for how poetry formally transmits these experiences.
Poetry formally encodes and enacts a spiritual experience through its very form—not just describing it like a document.
The author will examine Wordsworth as the primary case study because his poems follow a distinctive pattern: they move from states of turbulence and excitement into tranquility. This movement is repeated across his works—the boy of Winander, Ruth, the Lucy poems—all undergo shifts from agitation to calm.
Why Wordsworth Breaks the Categories
Many scholars describe Wordsworth's poetry as Christian or compatible with Christianity. Others have framed it as a retreat from religion into art—what's sometimes called secularization. The author argues this misses something essential: for Wordsworth, poetry and religion share a common source.
In his 1815 supplementary essay to the preface, Wordsworth distinguishes between what he calls "the spirit of religion"—which poetry administers—and institutional religion, which makes up deficiencies of reason by faith. Poetry aligned with the spirit of religion has what he calls a divine origin: passionate for the instruction of reason, ethereal and transcendent, yet capable of sustaining without external incarnation.
The difference is crucial. For Wordsworth, creativity begins with an experience of the ethereal and the transcendent—first felt in the blood, then passing to the mind where it becomes poetry understood.
Close Reading: My Heart Leaps Up
In the short poem "My Heart Leaps Up," this movement from excitement to calm appears in miniature. The first line performs that enthusiasm through "leaps up"—a spondee, a foot with two stressed syllables expressing genuine excitement. This brings readers to the precipice of an enjammed line: no punctuation, leaving the sense incomplete.
The reader must hold this suspended moment until the object is revealed in the second line—a rainbow in the sky. Then comes repetition: "So was it when my life began. So is it now I am a man." This is called epiphora—when a line begins with the same word as the previous line. It establishes stability through the speaker's wish to enshrine this elation.
The final couplet resolves in perfect iambic meter: "And I could wish my days to be bound each to each by natural piety." This is the transit from emotionally excited to spiritually calm—the hallmark of Wordsworth's spiritual sensibility.
Critics might note that framing poetry as formally transmitting spiritual experience risks obscuring its historical and political contexts. The author's theory focuses on form rather than meaning, which some scholars would consider incomplete.
Bottom Line
The strongest part of this argument is the close reading: seeing how poem structure itself performs the spiritual movement rather than just describing it. The vulnerability is that post-secular theory remains niche in academic circles—audiences may need more background than a single lecture provides. But if you've ever felt a poem "do" something rather than simply say something, this course offers language for that intuition.