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The World Is Too Much With Us By William Wordsworth Analysis

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William Wordsworth is one of the forefathers of Romantic poetry. As an important part of the Romantic movement and a pantheist, Wordsworth saw nature in a very spiritual sense and expressed this through his writings (Farooq and Chandra 119). This spiritual veneration for nature was very much out of place in a world that was moving quickly towards industrialization. As the Industrial Revolution ensued, Wordsworth witnessed nature being destroyed in order to build and fuel new factories. Wordsworth also saw man's once close relationship with nature disintegrate as people spent more time indoors and working in factories. In "The World is Too Much With Us," Wordsworth explores the idea that man has lost an important part of its spirituality by forming a distant and abusive relationship with nature.
The speaker begins the poem by lamenting about how "the world is too much with us" or how human beings are becoming a destructive or ruinous force upon the natural world (Wordsworth 1). Human beings are using their "powers" to abuse nature and use it for their own personal gain (Wordsworth 2). According to the article by Farooq and Chandra, which explores ecocriticism or how humans connect to nature through literature and how Wordsworth played an influential role in awakening man to the importance of protecting nature through his writing, this disrespect of nature appalled Wordsworth, who believed that "preservation was man's responsibility and duty" (122). Wordsworth firmly

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