Poetry, Nature, and Humanity Theme Analysis

At the beginning of the 19th century, when Wordsworth was writing, England was moving towards industry and urbanity. Wordsworth believed that this sort of fast-paced, crowded lifestyle caused people’s minds to grow numb. Wordsworth wrote not for himself, but for the sake of his contemporaries, whose minds he believed were dull. He felt the need to use the subject of nature in his poetry in order to keep his readers emotionally alive and morally sensitive. He saw nature as the solution to the harms of urban life, and, thus, chose to center his Lyrical Ballads around experiences in nature. In his “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads,” Wordsworth highlights that his nature-centered poems have a “worthy purpose” in their potential to reverse the effects of urban life and revive dull minds: his poetry allows people to vicariously experience the profound joys of nature and be revived. In response to urbanization, he felt the need to create poetry that would be “well adapted to interest mankind permanently, and likewise important in the multiplicity and quality of its moral relations”—in other words, Wordsworth argues that his poetry can help keep humans human by bringing them back to nature.

In his “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads,” Wordsworth highlights how his nature-centered poetry has the power to turn people away from urbanity and industrialization, which he believes dull people’s minds. At the time of Wordsworth’s writing, the Industrial Revolution had recently transformed Britain: people migrated to the city and factories began to appear. Furthermore, Europe was in political upheaval and people were falling for propagandic messages. Wordsworth was bitterly disappointed by the result of the French Revolution and did not want England to follow after France. In general, Wordsworth disliked this trend towards urbanity, industry, mass media, and mass culture: the numbing of the mind arises as the result of “great national events which are daily taking place, and the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of information hourly gratifies.” In Wordsworth’s eyes, these aspects of society have led people to develop bad taste—they craved the instant gratification and revolution rather than profound joy and peace. This bad taste can be seen in his disdainful reference to contemporary Gothic novels and German melodramas: “The invaluable works of our elder writers […] are driven into neglect by frantic novels, sickly and stupid German tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse.” Wordsworth is eager to show that “the human mind is capable of being excited without the application of gross and violent stimulants” by creating a new class of more profound, natural literary enjoyment.

Wordsworth’s solution to mind-dulling urbanization is to bring people back to nature through poetry: nature-centered poetry allows people to vicariously experience the simple, unadulterated joys of the countryside. In his “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads,” Wordsworth explains that the time is ripe for his ballads, which will orient readers toward nature. He writes: “It has therefore appeared to me that to endeavor to produce or enlarge this capability is one of the best services in which, at any period, a Writer can be engaged; but this service, excellent at all times, is especially so at the present day.” In other words, Wordsworth thinks that the curative powers of nature-centered poetry are timeless and applicable to any generation but are especially potent for his age. The Lyrical Ballads represents a “species of poetry […] which is genuine poetry,” that “give[s] other enjoyments, of a purer, more lasting, and more exquisite nature.” For Wordsworth, nature-centered literature can be the antidote for depravity because such literature allows people who live in depraved societies to vicariously travel to a place of nature and tranquility and experience the purity of the “rustic” human experience. The “purer, more lasting, and more exquisite” joy that his nature-centered poetry brings forms a stark contrast to the “gross and violent” stimulation that urban life and sensational literature bring. Indeed, Wordsworth views nature to be the one of the most important subjects with which a poet can engage. He writes that “there is still left open to me what confessedly constitutes the most valuable object of all writing whether in prose or verse, […] the entire world of nature.” For the poet, nature “[supplies] endless combinations of form and imagery”—nature is both a valuable topic and a source of abundant inspiration. The pleasure of urban life and sensational literature is temporary and quickly depleted, leading people to seek stimulants that are still more “gross and violent”; the joy of nature, by contrast, is lasting and bountiful.

For Wordsworth, urban life and sensational literature has brought on the moral decline of humanity, and the best way to counter this is to bring people back to nature using Romantic poetry. In his “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads,” Wordsworth preps his reader to vicariously experience a stroll through the countryside, a quiet moment perched atop a cliff, or a sunset by the sea, all by reading one of Wordsworth’s ballads in the pages ahead. These nature-centered poems, Wordsworth argues, will not only revive readers and refresh their tired minds, but will also serve as a lasting source of joy.