Spencer Clavin’s mother and co-author unveil The Truth and Beauty, arguing Romantic poets—Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats—unwittingly rediscovered Jesus’ spiritual truths amid Enlightenment skepticism, framing creation as a "collaboration with the great I am." Wordsworth’s conversion and Coleridge’s lifelong faith contrast Keats’ early death, yet all grappled with materialism, gender roles, and radical politics through poetry. The book reinterprets Jesus’ teachings—like loving enemies—as incarnational truths obscured by rigid dogma, with Wordsworth’s shift from revolution to Christianity as its climax. Set for April release by Zondervan, it claims the poets’ work bridges faith, science, and modern doubt. [Automatically generated summary]
I hope you will read it and find it to be important to you as well.
The subtitle is How the Lives and Works of England's Greatest Poets Point the Way to a Deeper Understanding of the Words of Jesus.
And I wanted to talk about the book with my son, Spencer Clavin, the host of the Young Heretics podcast, because we've been talking about these issues endlessly for years.
As long as I can remember, really.
I mean, we've been on hikes and mused about the Romantic poets, and from that to scotches and cigars and talking about this stuff.
I know this is something that you're so passionate about.
I mean, it is your field of academic expertise, really.
And you've distilled it into this great book.
This really like rip, it's a rip-roaring good read, which is, you know, people might not expect that out of a book about English poets and dandies.
But as we've discussed, you know, it's these big personalities in this crucial time that's a lot like ours.
They're writing some of the best poetry in the world.
I mean, Keats' Ode to Autumn alone is worth the price of the book, just understanding what that poem is about.
But here's my next question for you, which is, what on earth does any of this have to do with Jesus?
This is a book about Jesus, right?
I mean, ultimately, this is about understanding the gospels, understanding why they matter, why they transform the whole world.
Why does that come out of the Romantic poets?
Well, my argument, and it's an argument that I share with other critics of these poets, is that they're dealing with the problems of unbelief, the problems that the idea that radical politics can solve everything, the idea that gender roles don't matter, the idea that science is the answer to all our problems and everything is made out of material and there is no spiritual life.
And they have found themselves separated from the spiritual underpinnings of the world.
And these poets, alone, well, everybody else was saying reason.
It's the age of reason.
Now we're going to be enlightened by reason.
These poets, especially these poets, are saying, yes, but I'm in here.
I have this interior world and it's in interaction.
It's in collaboration with the creation.
You know, Coleridge, the most brilliant of them all, the most intelligent of them all, said, we're in collaboration with the great I am.
And they started to rediscover in a new way, for a new age, how to talk about that.
And some of them didn't know that's what they were doing.
Some of them found out as they went along that it was a new way of seeing Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and tomorrow, but we change, our consciousness changes.
And so at the end of the book, the longest probably single chapter is like maybe the last third of the book, I go back to the words of Jesus and the life of Jesus and talk about how he is the source of the wisdom they found.
Not all of them knew it.
Wordsworth became a Christian in the end.
Coleridge was always a Christian because he was the smartest of them all.
Keats died so young that he never really got a chance.
But Jesus is the source of it all.
And when you read him through the lens of the Romantic poets, suddenly his words mean something fresh and new.
They don't mean something different than they ever meant before.
They meant something that has gotten lost as we've hardened our idea of religion.
This is my religion.
This is what's right and wrong.
This is what all of the stuff that Jesus was saying, love your enemy.
Like, what does that even mean?
Why would I do that?
Why on earth would I do that?
The answers are illuminated by the poets.
The answer to why you would even love your neighbor.
It sounds like, that sounds kind of nice, but what if my neighbor's a schmuck?
And what if in loving him, this is one of the big mistakes I think people make, he doesn't get any better.
He doesn't actually change.
Why have churches lost the power to draw us in?
And they basically just want to be a sort of adjunct of the world.
They want to either adopt leftist politics, Black Lives Matter and gay pride in their churches, or they want to oppose it.
You know, don't become a leftist.
But that's actually not what Jesus was talking about.
Jesus was actually talking about something entirely different.
And the poets, many of them, as I say, without meaning to, stumbled onto what I've now come to call the secret knowledge.
The secret knowledge is the worldview that Jesus had.
And what I try to do is by looking at Jesus in a new way, a different way, I try to get to know him, which was your suggestion.
You know, you said to me.
It's my fault, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's your fault.
Address all complaints.
Doc Lavin.
Exactly.
You know, you said you're trying to understand a philosophy, but you should try and get to know a man.
And when you try and get to know a man, what happens?
When you know somebody, you can see the world a little bit through his eyes.
When you see things through Jesus' eyes, obviously none of us can do it all the way, though we try to get closer to it all the time.
You see the world differently, and you see a lot of what is captured in some of the most beautiful English ever written in the poems of these writers and the novel by Mary Shelley.
You know, it's interesting.
I think Keats is probably my favorite of these poets.
You know, died young, turned out some of the most brilliant poems in the language.
And yet, in your book, what you're describing really becomes clear through the life of Wordsworth, I think.
It's a wonderful sort of fresh understanding of why Wordsworth found his faith, why he became the Christian that he became.
Because you have in the prelude, for example, you have him wandering through France as the revolution is basically desecrating the churches and looking back and realizing that that was the root.
Of course, that was the root of a lot of what's going wrong now.
As you say, there's plenty of the materialism, the godlessness, like all of that.
We know what's wrong.
But Wordsworth finds something that's right, right?
I mean, in the intimation of immortality, he has this beautiful line, right?
Not in utter nakedness, but trailing clouds of glory do we come from God who is our home.
That in seeing the mind alive in nature, he saw the mind that was God's mind.
I think there's something that people are going to wonder about, that I wonder about, which is, is this romantic way of rediscovering God in nature, is that just nature worship?
Do you know what I mean?
Because of course, you're right to insist on Jesus as kind of the key to all of this, but not all of them understood that.
So what's the difference there?
Yeah, that's a great question.
One of the things I say is that the poets looked at godless nature and Christian truth looked back at them.
And I think that that's the key is you can explain the meaning of Jesus, you know, meanings of Jesus, but you can't eliminate Jesus from the meaning.
And the reason for that is that Jesus brings to life meaning itself.
One of the points of the book is that they started to see that the spirituality of like the spirit of life was actually in each thing that they looked at.
It was all there, but only when it met the human imagination.
That's what brought it to light.
It comes right back to what we began with on that balcony so many months ago, years ago now, which is that it's about the personhood, right?
It's about the character of a human person and not some vast floating abstract spirit.
Exactly.
Personhood, the incarnation, is the meaning.
And everything Jesus does has a meaning.
He tells parables that have meanings and all this stuff.
But they can't exist without the parable.
And his meaning can't exist without him.
And I would say, philosophically speaking, I mean, philosophically speaking, instead of the idea that I'm trying to find a natural, which was some of the poets were trying to find a natural explanation for the supernatural truth.
But what I'm saying is, no, no, no, you cannot have one without the other.
And Jesus' incarnation is the key to the whole thing.
It explains a lot about women.
It explains a lot about science.
It explains a lot about politics.
Once you understand that this human being was the incarnation of the living God, everything starts to make sense.
And that's why Wordsworth, who was really the only one who lived a long time, they all died so young.
Wordsworth is the one guy who kind of makes that journey, starting as a radical, thinking that the French Revolution is going to change everything.
He makes the journey back to Christianity.
And I think the Christianity that he saw and the Christianity that Coleridge saw, who was the most brilliant of them all, is the Christianity I'm talking about, this secret knowledge of what Jesus was actually talking about that I think we need to rediscover in a new age.
Incarnation's Universal Explanation00:00:16
Once again, the book is called The Truth and Beauty, How the Lives and Works of England's Greatest Poets Point the Way to a Deper Understanding of the Words of Jesus.
It is out from Zondervan in early April, but I hope you will go and pre-order it on Amazon or wherever you pre-order your books so Zondervan knows that you're excited to get it.