‘We were the last romantics’, wrote Yeats in ‘Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931’, and indeed all the writers I have discussed were the direct heirs to ideas about art, religion, and identity initiated by the Romantics. That Romantic inheritance took many different forms, and in this study I have concentrated on the legacies of Wordsworth and Coleridge to a group of central Victorian writers. I have tried to draw attention to the fact that certain tensions incipient in the thought of Wordsworth and Coleridge, tensions between poetry and religion, rebellion and reaction, individualism and authority, continued to manifest themselves throughout the Victorian period. As the century proceeded, that is, and society became increasingly democratic, religion in turn became increasingly personal and secular. The ‘revolution’ conventionally associated with Romanticism was indeed not really achieved until the end of the nineteenth century.

The Oxford Tractarians, writing at the beginning of the period, were, as a matter of principle, committed to opposing any threat to the sacred authority of the Church. As a result they were inclined either to underplay or to Christianise the secularising tendencies of Wordsworth's mythopoeic vision, and to distrust Coleridge's speculative conclusions. Nevertheless, Christian orthodoxy did not by any means disqualify serious exploration of certain crucial aspects of Romantic theory. On the contrary, Coleridge's theories about the symbolic properties of language, and Kantian problems relating to epistemology and perception, were arguably confronted more honestly and pursued with more resourcefulness and intellectual rigour by Newman and Hopkins than by any of the non-Catholic writers considered in this study.