Wordsworth’s poetry is characterized by the poet’s visionary sympathy with the countryside of his birth, which was more powerful for him than conventional religion. His association with Nature had supplied him his true education.This is followed by his eager political enthusiasm for establishing a just society and his passion for liberty. When these hopes are extinguished, he turned to the next romantic solution; a journey to his own past with the romantic hope to rekindle and reconstruct his world all over again.
Wordsworth’s poetry provides an affirmation of the reciprocal relationship between the natural world and the inner self. Nature provides a direct personal experience to the. At times the distinction between the self and Nature is nearly merged.
“Hardly hedge rows, little lines
Of sportive wood run wild”
Wordsworth believed in the intuitive wisdom of the child and feared the danger of corrupting it by adverse and unnatural conditioning. The immortality ode contains a famous vision of the new born child.
“But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God who is our home
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison house begin to close
Upon the growing boy”
18th century Poetic language employed extravagant and grandiloquent unfeeling words, language that relied much too heavily on periphrasis, Latinisms and pathetic fallacy. Wordsworth was pleading for a folk, poetic style, plain and bare, devoid of decorative/figurative ornamentation.
“To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears”