SOURCE: “The Sacramental Imagination,” in Nature and the Victorian Imagination, edited by U. C. Knoepflmacher and G. B. Tennyson, University of California Press, 1977, pp. 370-90.

In the following essay, Tennyson discusses the influence of Keble's The Christian Year and Lectures on Poetry in Victorian England.

Every season Nature converts me from some unloving heresy, and will make a Catholic of me at last.

Coleridge Anima Poetae

Even before the Victorian period was properly under way, poets of a religious cast of mind had abandoned an unqualified belief in the kind of pantheism of Nature that characterized Wordsworth's youthful Nature poetry. Not the least of such poets was Wordsworth himself, who introduced his Ecclesiastical Sonnets (1822) by describing himself as one who had formerly sung of “mountain-quiet and boon nature's grace,” and now who was about to “seek upon the heights of Time the source / Of A holy river, on...