William Wordsworth was the central figure in the English Romantic revolution in poetry.His contribution to it was threefold.First,he formulated in his poems and his essays a new attitude toward nature.This was more than a matter of introducing nature imagery into his verse; it amounted to a fresh view of the organic relation between man and the natural world,and it culminated in metaphors of a wedding between nature and the human mind,and beyond that,in the sweeping metaphor of nature as emblematic of the mind of God,a mind that "feeds upon infinity" and "broods over the dark abyss." Second,Wordsworth probed deeply into his own sensibility as he traced,in his finest poem,The Prelude,the "growth of a poet's mind." The Prelude was in fact the first long autobiographical poem.Writing it in a drawn-out process of self-exploration,Wordsworth worked his way toward a modern psychological understanding of his own nature,and thus more broadly of human nature.Third,Wordsworth placed poetry at the centre of human experience; in impassioned rhetoric he pronounced poetry to be nothing less than "the first and last of all knowledge--it is as immortal as the heart of man," and he then went on to create some of the greatest English poetry of his century.It is probably safe to say that by the late 20th century he stood in critical estimation where Coleridge and Arnold had originally placed him,next to John Milton--who stands,of course,next to William Shakespeare. Some comments:
1.We often go through life as if we were unconscious of what is going on