‘The World Is Too Much With Us’ (1802) by William Wordsworth: Proto-Marxist 19th Century Ecocriticism?

William Wordsworth was born at Cockermouth, in Cumberland in 1770. Cumberland is part of the scenic region of north-western England known as The Lake District. His father, John Wordsworth, was a lawyer, and Anne Cookson was his mother. He was the second among five children in his family. He spent his childhood in this area of imposing landscapes which affected him deeply throughout his life and the immensity of those images pervaded all of his poetry.

Wordsworth is considered one of the founding fathers of English Romanticism who initiated the Romantic era in England and in English literature. Alongside the other great founding father of Romanticism, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, he published ‘Lyrical Ballads’ in 1798. In the preface Wordsworth gave his famous definition of poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility” and calls his own poems in the book “experimental”.

Wordsworth also made a bold statement of artistic intent in the preface(which many scholars see as a central work of Romantic literary theory) that no longer was their poetry to be constrained by the poetic diction of 18th century verse but would strive to encompass the language ‘‘really used by men’’ which…