ABSTRACT
None of the British Romantic writers was gnostic, not even William Blake, who happily embraced the charge when it was leveled at him on one occasion by Henry Crabb Robinson (Symons 1907: 298). Indeed, if Romanticism is to be associated with any ancient religion, it is with one that is in vital ways diametrically opposed to Gnosticism, which is pantheism. Wordsworth’s celebrated “sense sublime” Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean, and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man, A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things (“Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey,” ll. 96–103)
