Proto-Modern Morris: Divine Possession, Inhuman Force, and Eternal Return in William Morris's Epic Poems

Abstract

This dissertation reconstructs a neglected strand of nineteenth-century imagination—an atavistic but innovative challenge to humanism—in William Morris’s prose and poetry, with a focus on the mythological epics of his middle years. I stress Morris’s primary investments in premodern barbarism and inhuman nature, which I approach in terms of his self-avowed religion, paganism. My aim is to reconstruct this worldview at the levels of ethics, aesthetics, and historiography. In so doing, I distance Morris from a critical consensus which confines his work to a teleological progression from Romanticism to Marxism, and link him forward, in his seeming backwardness, to the aristocratic, traditionalist strain of Modernism. I center my readings on The Earthly Paradise (1868) and The Story of Sigurd the Volsung (1876), bringing them together with the poetry and criticism of Romantics including William Wordsworth and John Keats, Victorians such as Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Arthur Hallam, and High Modernist mainstays like W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot. This dissertation sketches an alternative intellectual history of the long-nineteenth century, in which certain thinkers start from a Romantic veneration of the passions, but gradually strip away its governing dialectical framework, revealing a “dynamist” world of interacting forces. In Chapter 1, I distinguish Morris’s notion of paganism from that of the Romantics, building a genealogical through-line towards Modernist primitivism, which I use as a paradigm for explaining the metaphysical function of Hellenic and Norse gods in Morris’s epics. In Chapter 2, I apply this framework to Morris’s aesthetic philosophy, revealing a new model of impassioned artistry with unexplored origins in Hallam’s and Tennyson’s “poetry of sensation.” Carrying this method to its most radical conclusion, Morris paves the way for Yeats’s and Pound’s poetics of divine possession, and their conception of aesthetic form as objectified force. In Chapter 3, I build on critical discussions of Morris’s willful anachronism to read The Story of Sigurd the Volsung as an anti-historicist model of cyclical recurrence and dynamic tradition, paving the way for the Modernist motif of the return.