![]() (By the way, can you identify what type of poem “The World” is?) Like most Romantics, Wordsworth wanted to flee from the corruption he saw surrounding him.Ĭaspar David Friedrich, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, 1818 Again, Wordsworth captures this sentiment of Romanticism in his poem “The World is too much with us” (page 1363 in The Norton): here Wordsworth finds our mundane lives spent at earning money and spending it on material possessions as draining our spiritual energies (“The world is too much with us, late and soon,/ Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers” ). Now most Romantic poets wrote about escaping from society into the natural, wild world. (The period that most Romantic poets wrote during was 1750-1830, which corresponds to the rise of Industrial Europe.) ![]() That is, when the Romantics look at the civilized world around them they saw greed, cruelty, perversion, and the destruction of nature. ![]() Part of this praise of childhood was a rejection of society. As Wordsworth captures here, it is the world that must learn from the child. ![]() Wordsworth writes about the superiority of the child’s innocence over the worldliness of the adult: “Oh dearest, dearest Boy! My heart/ For better lore could seldom yearn/ Could I but teach the hundredth part/ Of what from thee I learn” ( “Anecdote for Father”). ![]()
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