"The World is Too Much with Us": Analysis

William Wordsworth’s “The World is Too Much with Us” (1807) is a sonnet that speaks to the discontent that many readers feel with the materialistic precedence of contemporary society.  Within “The World is Too Much with Us”, Wordsworth expresses his romantic belief that every facet of life in modern civilization pulls us further and further from our true nature as human beings and pushes us towards an unnatural state of civilized existence where we are estranged from our roots as natural beings.  Wordsworth’s romantic view is that we, as parts of the natural world, used to live free and spiritually fulfilling lives when we were pre-Christian Pagans, living in the bosom of the forest and praying to ancient gods of the elements.  It is for this that Wordsworth could be argued as being well ahead of his time, Wordsworth’s “The World is Too Much with Us” having a message as powerful and true today as when Wordsworth first wrote it over two hundred years ago.

William Wordsworth (1770 – 1850) was a Romantic poet and a significant creative force engendering much of the 19th centuries’ Romantic Age of Literature.  An original poet for many different artistic virtues, Wordsworth’s personality and conscience made him the perfect father for a literary movement that would resound philosophically to this day.  Romanticism, defined by it predisposition towards nature and its deep emotional connection to the feelings of the poet, philosophically finds itself represented perfectly by Wordsworth’s “The World is Too Much with Us”.  By capturing the spiritual dissatisfaction many of us can feel when fulfilling our roles as proverbial cogs in the great social machine we live in, and painting in rhyme a romantic collage of a fantastic pagan past, Wordsworth’s “The World is Too Much with Us” can be easily argued as one of Wordsworth’s most popular works of Romanticism. 

Another poetic revolution, for the sake of any reader who wished to appreciate his works, was William Wordsworth’s acceptance of all forms of readership and choosing to write in very plain English the poems that he intended for mainstream circulation.  Wordsworth’s writing was a movement away from those of his peers who wrote specifically for educated aristocrats and intellectual elites.  Instead, Wordsworth wrote for the average Englishman. His language and vocabulary was very plainly spoken and, while the actual themes may themselves be significantly deeper, much of his poetry can be appreciated for its imagery and the emotions they evoke alone.  William Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” (1804) is a perfect example of Wordsworth’s inclusive style of literary consumption: through its use of imagery and romantic expression, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” came to be known affectionately as “Daffodils” for no other reason than much of its readership appreciated it for its vibrant imagery of daffodils dancing in a shore breeze.  It would be this literary inclusiveness and popular consumption that would make Wordsworth’s poetry so widely recited, even today.

The very theme of Wordsworth’s “The World is Too Much with Us” is a concept that many grass roots, 19th century English people could relate to.  The popular dissatisfaction with the status quo (which consisted of wealthy landowners supporting their luxurious lifestyle on the labor of those who worked beneath them in the abysmal drudgery of Europe’s Industrial Revolution), made the message of Wordsworth’s “The World is Too Much with Us” something they could easily find virtue in.  Wordsworth’s readers could relate to a fantasy of returning to nature and a mystical life in its care, appreciating the romantic philosophy of seeking an existence as close to nature and as far removed from the strains of civilization as possible.  It is within this philosophical view that Wordsworth’s “The World is Too Much with Us” comes to be fully appreciated.