Debates over the original meaning of the establishment clause have usually revolved around the question of which broad church-state principle is represented by the clause. Strict separationists advocating a “wall of separation” highlight different historical evidence than do non-preferentialists who argue that the clause allows evenhanded government support for religion. A third group asserts that the clause was instead a federalism provision designed to reserve church-state decisions to the states. This chapter assesses these conflicting interpretations and concludes that the framers and the public understood the clause only as banning the establishment of a national church. That understanding did not necessarily represent an anti-establishment principle, however, and it assumed that church-state issues would continue to be resolved by the states. In light of the Supreme Court’s adoption of the incorporation doctrine, the combination of the federalism interpretation and the no-national-religion prohibition best encompasses the original constitutional decision.

Lyrical Ballads is well established as a work of literary collaboration, co-conceived, co-authored and ‘rooted in friendship’.1 Jack Stillinger calls it ‘the most famous co-authored book in English literature’.2 The ‘most famous’ literary collaborators are of course Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, ‘twins almost in genius and mind’ as Wordsworth phrases it in his Prelude.3 However, the volume’s various, complex print histories point to the role of multiple collaborators in creating the texts we know as Lyrical Ballads. This chapter begins with a re-examination of the original project of creating an anonymous, collaborative poetry collection, taking into account the 1798 print variants, and moves towards a wider examination of what collaboration may mean in the production of the 1798 and 1800 editions. In so doing, it reconsiders the role of literary friendships and influences, as well as the domestic processes of poetic production. More importantly, this chapter re-centres Dorothy Wordsworth as a key collaborator, drawing on Elizabeth Fay’s conception of Wordsworth the poet as ‘William and Dorothy Wordsworth combined’.4 Nicola Healey calls Lyrical Ballads ‘a symbol of their collaborative textual union’.5 However, even in the introduction to the authoritative Cornell edition of Lyrical Ballads, Dorothy appears only as a companion, a copyist, and as a commentator on the publication prospects of the male poets’ work. This chapter therefore follows on from the work of Fay and Healey in repositioning Dorothy as a principal creative partner, as ‘part of William’s writing self’, as well as considering the importance of the presence of John Wordsworth at Dove Cottage during the production of the 1800 edition (Healey, 167).

Although recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions respecting corporate religious liberty have been heavily criticized, this chapter argues that corporate religious freedom is not the novel or radical development that critics decry. What is new, rather, is an increasingly intense opposition to any special legal accommodation of religious commitments. Indeed, upon close examination, the familiar criticisms do not for the most part actually turn on anything peculiar to the corporate form. They are better understood as manifestations of an emerging, deep-seated opposition to the traditional American commitment to religious freedom as a distinctive legal right. And this opposition is itself part of a broader effort to repudiate the vestiges of an older religious or biblical conception of American community, as described in Robert Bellah’s influential scholarship on American “civil religion,” in favor of a different conception that we might describe as “secular” or “progressive.”

This chapter follows the principles outlined in the introduction by responding to the three early editions (1798, 1800, 1802) of Lyrical Ballads as a combined totality: three parts that make up one whole. It uses the historicity provided by the reception of the ‘Preface’ in each of the three parts to pull out defining features of response to the volume in its own time. John E. Jordan states of Lyrical Ballads, ‘For so long now we have thought of the work as a literary landmark, forgetting that many of the characteristics of that monument are the accumulation of age or the effects of perspective’.2 By looking at what the volume was assumed to be without (before) the ‘Preface,’ as well as once this prose essay is added, we can begin to understand its intended and actual impact within its own time. Approaching the volume in this way allows us to see how the work itself accumulates over time and in conjunction with its reception, as well as drawing out for us the core principles it was understood to embody.

It is no exaggeration to say that sympathy is the founding principle of the poems collected in both the first and second editions of the Lyrical Ballads. Together with the associated and overlapping affective impulses of compassion, pity, identification, and what we tend now to call ‘empathy’, sympathy, or its absence, is a central organising impulse of almost every poem in the collection. Sympathy – a feeling for or feeling with – is expressed and explored in various ways and with, or towards, different kinds of individuals or objects (including animals and inanimate objects), but is consistently the focus of poem after poem. As Wordsworth comments in the final poem in the 1800, two-volume edition of Lyrical Ballads, the ‘power / Of Nature’ has led him to ‘feel / For passions that were not my own’ and thereby to think ‘On man, the heart of man, and human life’ (LB ‘Michael’, 28–31).

In recent years a new approach to the study of British Romantic literature has fundamentally altered the kinds of questions posed by literary criticism. This new approach, known as ecocriticism, first emerged into prominence during the 1990s, a period of increasing environmental concern throughout the industrialised world. Jonathan Bate’s influential study Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition was among the first to examine the ecological elements of British Romanticism, arguing that Wordsworth articulated a powerful and enduring vision of human integration with nature.1 Ecological critics have pondered fundamental questions about the purpose of literary criticism, and of imaginative literature itself, in a time of ever-increasing environmental crisis. In an era of impending threats to the global environment, the emerging discipline of ecocriticism is engaged in a vital re-vision of the fundamental task of poetry. Greg Garrard explains: ‘Environmental problems require analysis in cultural as well as scientific terms, because they are the outcome of an interaction between ecological knowledge of nature and its cultural inflection’.2 Because it often seeks to address perennial questions concerning the relationship between humankind and the natural world, British Romantic poetry has become one of the most important terrains for the development of ecocriticism. Moreover, the canon of British Romantic literature has been broadened and reshaped by the consideration of what constitutes an environmental text.3

Societies embracing religious liberty have been comparatively rare in human history. Political rulers possess strong incentives to control the spiritual marketplace, whereas the clergy of a dominant faith will seek state protection to prevent rival groups from challenging their hegemony. With a close affinity for church-state unity, why would any nation liberalize laws and allow greater freedoms for religious minorities? In contrast to explanations that focus on a shifting ideational landscape, this chapter argues that reasons for the rise of religious liberty can be found in the economic incentives facing political leaders. When deregulating the religious market enhances revenue collection, economic growth, and bolsters needed immigration, governments will reduce restrictions on religious minorities. Colonial America remained divided as to whether religious liberty was a good idea, but the economic necessities facing a new nation led to passage of the First Amendment.

This chapter engages in a critical review of the main thesis of Christopher Eisgruber and Lawrence Sager in Religious Freedom and the Constitution (Harvard, 2007), that religion is not “a … category of human experience that demands special benefits and/or necessitates special restrictions” or any “special immunity for religiously motivated conduct.” Against this position, this chapter argues that natural religion of the form manifested in the New York Regents’ prayer outlawed by the U.S. Supreme Court in Engel v. Vitale (1962) is not to be put on the same constitutional level as (or below) other human passionate interests or even conscience. The paper considers the Indian and the European Convention provisions on religious liberty.

The idea of religious liberty is sometimes thought to be necessary precisely because people will not agree on religious opinions. Yet the American tradition of religious freedom is grounded in the reality of both revealed religion and natural religion. While revealed religion, which is more contentious, is most often the subject of First Amendment cases, religious liberty need not presuppose that all religious knowledge is impossible. Instead, the Declaration of Independence famously affirms natural religion: that some things about God, human nature, and individual rights are knowable by reason. This chapter considers areas of natural religion, reason, and presuppositional thinking in order to show how knowledge is possible and how greater agreement can be achieved concerning religion.

The ‘Advertisement’ to the 1798 Lyrical Ballads anticipates a common theme in early responses to the volume: the poems are extraordinarily challenging. Reviewers were quick to agree that the poems frequently – and for some too frequently – required them ‘to struggle with feelings of strangeness and aukwardness’ and especially that they ‘sometimes [descend] too low’ stylistically, employing language that is ‘too familiar, and not of sufficient dignity’ (LB 3). One reviewer for the New London Review, reacting to Wordsworth’s statement that a ‘majority of the poems’ are to be considered ‘experiments’ intended to ‘ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure’ (LB 3), bluntly declares that such language ‘can never be considered as the language of poetry’.1 As discourse intended to ‘affect the imagination’, the commentator argues, poetic language must ‘at least address itself to the imagination’, which has its own ‘peculiar style’ (33). Quoting Wordsworth’s advice to readers not to ‘suffer the solitary word Poetry, a word of very disputed meaning, to stand in the way of their gratification’, but instead to be pleased ‘in spite of that most dreadful enemy to our pleasures, our own pre-established codes of decision’, the reviewer comments: ‘Nothing can be more ludicrous than this ingenious request of our author’ (33). The experiments of Lyrical Ballads stem from an ‘indecision of taste’ traceable to the lamentable influence of Percy’s Reliques on ‘a numerous and meager race of stanza-enditers’ who ‘seem to have thought, that rudeness was synonimous [sic] to simplicity’ (33).

This chapter distinguishes and explores two historical justifications for the separation of church and state in America. The first separation is a specifically Christian piece of political theology, in large part for the benefit of a Christian civil society. The second separation is a specifically secular position for the benefit of a liberal society that wishes to divest from and repudiate Christianity. This chapter then describes the allure of equality and nondiscrimination as church-state ideals, their ascendancy in late twentieth-century constitutional law, and the sense in which they are believed to have supplanted the first version of separation. This chapter argues that neither equality nor nondiscrimination delivers a valueless perspective on the social and political worth of Christianity. The second separation holds that Christianity is an irrelevant, or even an obnoxious and illegitimate, influence in the making of laws or the structuring of the cultural and political realms. In a society in which Christianity has had such overwhelming predominance, insisting on equality is tantamount to squelching it and is nothing less than an expression of the second separation.

If the first readers of Lyrical Ballads were perplexed by the title of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s anthology, this was not immediately clear in the initial flurry of critical reviews. Where commentators were either pleased or irritated by the collection as a whole, there was little to indicate that they were at all flummoxed by the concept of ‘lyrical ballads’. In his ‘Advertisement’ to Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth had informed his readers that the poems contained therein should be considered ‘experiments’ (LB 3), and he was at pains in the ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads to elucidate the innovative poetics of the anthology. Yet neither he nor Coleridge felt it necessary to clarify their unusual title. This was despite the fact that the lyric tradition in the Western canon, and the ballad form, connoted very different – sometimes seemingly incommensurate – histories, conventions, and aesthetic and social connotations.

It may be that this chapter will appear to make too much of the word ‘things’. After all, in common usage ‘things’ and ‘objects’ are more or less synonymous, and with that understanding the chapter might as well have been called ‘The Power of Objects in Lyrical Ballads’. What follows is written in the belief not only that there is a distinction between things and objects but that Wordsworth attends carefully to the distinction, and that it is helpful to think of Lyrical Ballads as an exploration, at certain moments, of the imagination’s way of seeing objects primordially – of seeing them, that is, as things. Much of the time, to be sure, things and objects are as interchangeable in Wordsworth’s vocabulary as they are for most of us. But sometimes there is a difference, an important difference that helps to explain the frequent vagueness of his language in his more ecstatic moments (in contrast, for example, with the precise niceties of Coleridge even in such moments), a vagueness disagreeable to his detractors, yet perhaps the very quality his admirers relish most when they find him most affecting. There will be no need here to pause over his vagueness, let alone subject it to stylistic analysis; rather, it will be taken for granted as his way of expressing the power of things, all things in their unity, including the senses in which humans too are things.

By 1802, Coleridge had begun to suspect what the next thirty years would confirm – that there was a ‘radical Difference’ between Wordsworth’s conception of poetry and his own (CL STC II. 830). Lyrical Ballads was the outcome of a period of initial excitement when, at the start of a relationship, each man was able to suspend his difference and, for a while, be a version of himself that met the other’s hopes and ideals. As such, it was a typical project for Coleridge, who had an intense need to be part of a literary circle in which friendship gave rise to, and was in turn intensified by, communal writing, reading and publishing. He had been co-writing or co-publishing poems with Southey since 1794; in 1797 his first verse collection included poems by his friends Charles Lloyd and Charles Lamb. Wordsworth, on the other hand, had never published collaboratively before and never would again. In a sense, then, Lyrical Ballads (1798) was a Coleridgean volume, one of many co-authored outlets for a practice of versifying that he shared with friends – a practice that was often self-reflexive: the poems were often about the shared experiences of the friends with whom they were written and/or to whom they were recited. A case in point was ‘This Lime Tree Bower My Prison’, the poem in which Coleridge first invoked William and Dorothy in the conversational voice that he and Wordsworth would develop during the next five years. The poem features Charles Lamb as well as the Wordsworths and was recited to them on the spot where it was composed. It was not, however, published in Lyrical Ballads but in Southey’s Annual Anthology alongside contributions by other members of the circle – including Joseph Cottle, the Bristol bookseller who published both it and Lyrical Ballads. This pattern suggests that Lyrical Ballads was just one of many joint publications by which Coleridge sought to promote the innovatory poetic style of the West Country circle, and in so doing endorse their group language. Other poems went into the columns of The Morning Post, where verse by Southey and by Mary Robinson (a satellite member of the group) also appeared.