Recent scholarship on the British Romantic poet William Wordsworth usually depicts him as a secular humanist during the years of his creative ascendancy. In The Christian Wordsworth, 1798 1805, William A. Ulmer challenges this consensus by arguing that Wordsworth never abandoned his faith in a supernatural Deity and that the poet s theism included important Christian sympathies as early as 1798. By tracing the changes in Wordsworth s religious beliefs from the early secular period to the later Anglican period Ulmer reconstructs the strategic indirections by which the poet s faith shapes his major poems. In readings of The Ruined Cottage, the Pedlar narrative, Tintern Abbey, the Prospectus, the Ode, The Prelude, and other texts, Ulmer presents a poet increasingly determined to stage the prophetic revelations of his poems against carefully established Christian backgrounds. Through this revisionary traditionalism, Wordsworth attempts to preserve England s Christian heritage by adapting it to modern needs. Revisionary in its own right, Ulmer s book provides an innovative perspective on Romantic natural supernaturalism and on William Wordsworth s religious poetics and intellectual development."