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.

On first glance, British literature of the 1930s offers a natural subject for a dedicated Cambridge Companion. As critics have often remarked, few other decades seem to claim such a compelling status as a distinct literary-historical era, with a series of political events, aesthetic debates, and emerging literary networks providing an identity that goes beyond the normal convenience of decade-based periodisation and into ‘one of literary history’s most stable and flourishing concepts’. With just a slight nudging of the boundaries, the 1930s is often characterised as running from 1929 until 1939, from the stock market crash of 1929 until the arrival of the Second World War, with September 1939 marking an end to the epoch as the world entered a cataclysmic new phase.

For most twenty-first-century readers, the starting place for studying the poetry of the 1930s is Robin Skelton’s much-reprinted 1964 anthology Poetry of the Thirties. More influential even than Samuel Hynes’s book The Auden Generation (1976), it established the 1930s English canon as the poems of upper-middle-class educated men born between 1902 and 1916, a generation cut off from traditional certainties by the Great War in which they were too young to fight. Consciously departing from the patriotism and rural imagery of Georgian poetry, these men admired T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) but refused the modernist decentring of the post-Romantic subjective ‘I’.

‘It is not an exaggeration to say that for most people “a book” means a novel.’ So wrote Q. D. Leavis in her pioneering Fiction and the Reading Public (1932), reflecting on the supremacy of the novel in an era when universal literacy had created what she called an ‘inveterate general reading habit’ among the British. Yet the novel of Leavis’s own decade would be so comprehensively overshadowed by poetry in the course of the following half-century that it was still the case in the late 1980s that Valentine Cunningham could write in his landmark survey of the period that ‘when we think of literature in the 1930s our current orthodoxies usually have us thinking first of poets’.

The end of the First World War and the relaxation of restrictions on travel that were in place during it produced a sense of release, among other emotions. Paul Fussell employs an aptly exuberant simile when he refers to the many writers who were ‘propelled on their post-war travels as if by a wartime spring tightly compressed’. Besides those that will be discussed in this chapter, Fussell’s list of several members of the ‘British Literary Diaspora’ who travelled or went to live in exile around the globe includes Norman Douglas, Lawrence Durrell, V. S. Pritchett, and Robert Graves. The propulsion that Fussell describes is evident in D. H. Lawrence’s statement in his Sea and Sardinia (1921): ‘Comes over one an absolute necessity to move.’ This urge to mobility is often accompanied by an energetic sense of inquiry.

In a lecture delivered early in 1936 entitled ‘Poetry and Film’, W. H. Auden offered a Marxist-shaded characterisation of modernism within a brief, reductive account of the historical division of high and low art. The class divisions that grew out of the Industrial Revolution, Auden asserted, had also given rise to an intermediate social element, ‘a class of people living apart from industry but supported by its profits – the rentier class’. Modernism, Auden claims, can be understood as nothing other than ‘rentier art’, an artistic expression of the outlook of this dependent, impractical side-branch of the industrial ruling class: ‘A distinct type of art arose […] developing through Cezanne, Proust and Joyce.’ In what follows, Auden does not further linger over this dismissive account of three great innovators of modern art and literature, but hastens on to the real focus of his lecture, which is popular art and specifically the art of film.

Although the First and Second World Wars were fought a generation apart, their historical, ethical, and political meanings continue to be debated. The terms concern whether both wars should be regarded as constituting a continuous battle for political and cultural supremacy or as distinct events, as either one battle bleeding into another with a brief interruption or as the Second World War erupting from unresolved, conflicting ideologies and interests carried over from the First. Squeezed between these perspectives is the decade of the 1930s in which memories of the 1914–18 war and anxieties about another conflagration were troubled further by the economic and social consequences of the Great Depression that devastated people’s lives on both sides of the divide. The 1930s in Britain was a war between, in which political, social, and cultural debates served as the only available weapons of defence against pervasive doubts about both the unstable present and the possibility of a stable future.

It is today often presumed – by, for instance, the Oxford English Dictionary – that the term ‘queer’ only began to be reclaimed with pride in the 1980s. But as queer historians have long recognised, this is in fact inaccurate, for a more or less defiant use of this term as a self-descriptor dates at least as far back as 1939, to Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories. It is, therefore, not so much an anachronism as a historical imperative to affirm the 1930s as queer. Indeed, given the prominence of a particular group of left-wing writers, including Isherwood himself, W. H. Auden, and Stephen Spender, the 1930s have often been categorised as a ‘pink decade’: as, in other words, foundational for twentieth-century queer literature, politics, and culture in Britain.