CYNTHIA SCHEINBERGChristianity - which claims that God is a Heavenly Maker who in turn
makes the poet, and asserts that the holy Psalms were authored by King
David - Sidney's notions of poetry are rooted in a particular set of religious
preconceptions about biblical authorship, divine creation, and scriptural
history that he readily assumes that his audience will share. By comparison,
Carlyle uses altogether vaguer references to spirituality, referring to "the
sacred mystery of the Universe, what Goethe calls 'the open secret!'"
Calling on a distinguished German Romantic writer rather than specific
scriptural or doctrinal allusions, Carlyle noticeably avoids defining a
specific religious context for the divine knowledge that his vates receives.
Indeed, Carlyle's open-ended descriptions of the very nature of the "divine
secret" reflect significant shifts in literary and religious cultures since the
time when Sidney's famous essay appeared.
In this chapter, I argue that one way to explain the decisively "open"
language that characterizes Carlyle's naming of the prophetic nature of the
vates is that in nineteenth-century England it had become increasingly
difficult to designate any one theological position as a source of universal
truth for the nation. Despite the fact that England still had a state religion
(Anglicanism), Carlyle's society was differentiated from Sidney's by an
increased presence of diverse religious communities that were gaining
economic, political, and social status. Victorian religious poetry became an
important site for presenting divergent religious perspectives, providing a
dynamic forum where writers frequently explored the fraught experience of
living as a religious "other" in England.
It is perhaps easiest t o understand the increasing diversity that marked
Victorian poetic and religious identity by examining some of the salient
historical changes that occurred in English culture between the sixteenth
and nineteenth centuries. In Sidney's England, poetry was for the most part
a courtly endeavor, one that had distinct ramifications for the relationships
that poetry maintained with religious authority, religious discourse, and
religious doctrine. In 1534 Henry VIII had broken from the Roman
Catholic Church and established the Anglican Church, placing himself at
its head. After the death of Henry VIII's heir Edward VI in 1553, however,
Queen Mary returned the monarchy to the Roman Catholic Church, and
religious and national turbulence ruled in England during her five-year
reign. It was Henry VIII's younger daughter Elizabeth who eventually
gained the throne in 1558 and solidified the bonds between the English
government, the Anglican Church, and the nobles of the court who
supported the newly formed state religion. In Elizabethan England, poets
and poetry were supported through royal and noble patronage, and so in
essence poetry was also bonded to the Anglican institutions to which all of
160