The Industrial Revolution and similar changes in British society provided the inspiration for Wordsworth's poetry and prose.
Wordsworth lamented the significant changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution. Commerce and economics became the driving forces of development. Industrialization led to urbanization and the emergence of crowded and polluted city life. Nature was harvested for personal wealth. People adopted the desire to make and keep money as a way to form their individual and social identities.
Wordsworth's writing laments these shifts in his prose and poetry. In Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth writes about a “humble and rustic life” as an ideal form of living. He yearns for a vision of human beings "less under restraint" because of "elementary feelings" and a simplicity found in nature. This reverence for the natural world is in stark contrast to the deification of commerce and industrial growth. His advocacy for nature is also evident in his poetry. In "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," Wordsworth affirms that the natural world is the only place where he can find "that inward eye/ Which is the bliss of solitude." He discovers this when looking at a field of golden daffodils. Wordsworth viewed nature as a cradle to human development. In "My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold," Wordsworth sees a rainbow in the sky and immediately appreciates the permanence of the natural world. The same rainbow he saw a child is there as an adult. While he might have changed, the natural world has remained. Its permanence causes him to realize that "the child is the father of the man."
Wordsworth mourned how British society valorized commercial wealth. He wanted people to embrace nature as permanent and more important than industrial development. In his prose and poetry, Wordsworth wanted individuals to reject the changes that industrialization and urbanization brought. He wanted a return to a more authentic "state of nature" where human beings had a stronger bond to nature.
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