Re-Reading Wordsworth’s “Michael”: Sacramental Poetics in a Secular Age

AbstractThis essay focuses on how William Wordsworth’s “Michael can be considered an aesthetic or phenomenological transcription of what it feels like to go through the investiture crisis experienced when one abruptly transitions from the self-enclosed world of local knowledge into the unbounded world of secular modernity. I argue that the poem functions as an example of sacramental poetics, or a poetics that is potentially able to not only signify but also effect grace by affecting the body of the observant participant in a special way. The first of three sections explores how “Michael” might conform to T. S. Eliot’s conception of a dissociation of sensibility, and responds to Marjorie Levinson’s influential reading of the poem. The remaining two sections aim for more novel speculations about what the poem by first drawing upon the work of the political theorist William Connolly and the neurobiologist Joseph LeDoux to explore how the sensibilities “Michael” invokes in its readers might be related to a sacramental poetics that affects the infrasensible dimension of being human. Finally, in the last section I demonstrate how Eric Santner’s conception of psychotheology can be used to further clarify how and why “Michael” might function as a sacramental poetics, and conclude by suggesting how the poem has the potential to help us see more fully what the study of religion and literature might mean in a secular age.