Revelation and Knowledge: Romanticism and Religious Faith by Ross Woodman with Joel Faflak (review)

Ross Woodman’s career in the field of Romantic studies is marked by an interest in the psychoanalytic and revelationary, and his new study, Revelation and Knowledge: Romanticism and Religious Faith, is no exception. Building on his earlier work in Apocalyptic Vision in the Poetry of Shelley (1964) and Sanity, Madness, Transformation: The Psyche in Romanticism (2005), Revelation and Knowledge frames the Romantic acts of perception, imagination, and creation as spiritual moments of revealing that work against the ostensible Enlightenment crisis of faith. The book is not, as it might appear, a critical book on Romanticism and religion, a parallel interdisciplinary field more concerned with the hermeneutics of Christian experience as it figured through the historical writings and lives of the British Romantics. Rather, Woodman develops depth psychology, the work of C.G. Jung, and mysticism through his personal engagement with the Bahá’í faith and the dream of the Báb (who, for the Bahá’ís, is the spiritual return of Elijah and John the Baptist) as a way of thinking about and reading the canonical Romantics, most notably William Blake. Joel Faflak’s illuminating introduction to the book lays bare its unusual methodological confessionalism through Faflak’s own relation to Woodman as teacher, a relationship echoed in Woodman’s discovery of Romanticism through the divine books of the world religions under Northrop Frye. As Woodman writes, ‘I quickly realized that Frye’s great advantage over me in his graduate class was the fact that as an ordained minister in the United Church of Canada he was a devout, if heterodox, Christian. (Frye’s word is “underground.”)’ Woodman himself occupies an ‘underground’ relationship to Romanticism here, accessing the worlds revealed by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, and Blake as eternal and archetypal, rather than metaphorical and symbolic. His readings of the poets and their writings, however, often result in a series of orthodox views that appear immune, not only to the influence of gender and feminist studies on both Romanticism and psychoanalysis, but also to the array of critics now working on Romantic religion and literature. Thus, Blake’s ‘Female will’ is read solely as a corporeal ‘x201C;object world” of the senses,’ an empiricism that signals the ‘death of philosophy,’ while the emergent popular culture of the 1960s is understood as exuding a joy that ‘belied the wholesale destruction being enacted within it.’ Woodman’s pedagogy too seems to divide into a desire to at once judge and guide students. Teaching Blake, Woodman recalls grouping students into ‘Reprobates’ (those who can’t, in Woodman’s opinion, advance beyond Blake’s Songs), the ‘Elect’ (who can be ignored as long as they are instructed on how to pass the final exam), and the ‘Redeemed’ (‘who were at least willing to learn’). At the same time, he seems committed to opening the dream worlds and visions of a Romantic poetry understood in the book as counter to arguments promoting war and dehumanization. Ultimately a confessional reading of Woodman’s own dream of the Báb as an unveiling of his unconscious, the book serves as a retrospective on an unusual and distinguished sixty-five-year career in an ever-transforming discipline. Faflak’s introduction helps reframe such reflection in relation to the questions currently at the heart of this discipline, pushing readers to think the possibility of belief and faith beyond metaphor.