“‘The World Is Too Much With Us’” - Dr. Jason Baxter

On May 27, 2026, Dr. Jason Baxter continued our spring college retreat by situating William Wordsworth within the English Industrial Revolution. Facing the collapse of medieval cosmology and mechanization of the world, Wordsworth refused to despair and turned to the spiritual depths of nature.

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Transcript

This lecture is called "The World Is Too Much With Us." A recent media theorist, Tung-Hui Hu, opens his book with this uncomfortable description of us: "Maybe you've glanced down at your phone and caught yourself scrolling mindlessly through a list of friends rather than choosing to connect with any of them. Maybe you suddenly feel you've run out of words in a world where you are free and even expected to express yourself, and all you can come up with is three letters: LOL. Maybe a job lead arrives, but you find it easier to click away the hours at your current gig than to think about your future. There's a strange set of feelings here — of being passive, or wanting to disassociate and be anyone but yourself, or avoiding decisions — that I call digital lethargy."

A nice phrase, digital lethargy. Digital lethargy is typified in one of those late-night scroll sessions in which you run out of things to do on your phone, but you feel glued to the screen, just scrolling, not even choosing to look at any content. Am I the only one who's done that? Being yourself has now become fatiguing. Why? Hu thinks that this lethargy, this psychic exhaustion, is the long-term effect of us being always on, as far as technology is concerned, even if you think you're logged off.

The giant technology companies of our day present themselves as the champions of authenticity. They will help you be whatever self you want to be — as long as you "continue to click and choose," that is. And what happens if you slow down? "Today the disengaged, lethargic user is treated by algorithms that prod the user into individuating themselves through a stream of clicks, or by social networks that remind the user of opportunities missed, or by trackers and sensors."

Notifications, alarms, alert bells, timers, dings, pop-up ads, banners, ambient videos greedily clamor for your attention. One thousand people are currently looking at this property. Four people currently have this in their shopping carts. Time is running out on this special offer. There is a faster route available that will let you avoid a slowdown. You have five hundred fewer steps than yesterday. This post got thirty percent fewer likes than the previous one. All day long, every day, we are poked and prodded by notifications, motivational posters, alarms, alerts, bells, dings, pop-ups, banners, videos — all of which want our attention, to prod us into doing something, in order to force us to be ourselves.

We count our steps to see if we can beat yesterday's number. We measure our sleep, we count our likes, we measure the bounce rate on our websites, we 10x our outcomes, we look for ways to get more looks, optimize our search visibility, and convert more sales. Thus, given that we have smartphones that clamor for our attention, an endless stream of emails and texts to answer and pictures to respond to, there is "a leakage of work into the home and into the private life." Hopefully this isn't giving anyone PTSD. As William Brownsberger has put it in his essay "Silence" — which I'd recommend; it's maybe one of the top ten things I've ever read — "one hardly needs to mention that contemporary life is at a saturation point in terms of noise and banal verbiage."

For us, then, when we read Wordsworth's famous sonnet "The World Is Too Much With Us," we have two thoughts. The first is: Wordsworth, you prophet, you seer — how did you, writing in 1802, foresee us?

The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;— Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon; The winds that will be howling at all hours, And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers; For this, for everything, we are out of tune; It moves us not. Great God! I'd rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

Around the same time, Wordsworth lamented his world's "degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation." You remember that? But as soon as we stop nodding our heads in agreement with Wordsworth, we think: wait — this sonnet and these sentiments were written in 1802, before AI and social media, before smartphones, before the internet, email, cars, interstates, airports, telephones, television, and the radio. Even the locomotive train would not be invented for another two years. And so our second response might be less patient. We find ourselves asking Wordsworth: what's your problem? You think you've got it bad, buddy? Then you should see us. But then we also want to ask: wait, you think the writing of a couple of poems in iambic verse is going to hold back the forces of industrial modernity?

But Wordsworth, though not insensible to the disproportionate forces, remains hopeful. You'll remember this one: "I should be oppressed with no dishonorable melancholy, had I not a deep impression of certain inherent and indestructible qualities of the human mind, and likewise of certain powers in the great and permanent objects that act upon it, which are equally inherent and indestructible."

In this lecture, then, I want to try to situate Wordsworth in this world, so that we can understand what he thought his poetry could do — what he thought he could do with words, how he thought poetry could change the world. In particular, I want to focus on changes in cosmology, which led to changes in the philosophy of history. Hopefully that doesn't sound too boring. Secondly, I want to focus on the new sociological experience of urban spaces. And finally, I want to talk about what Wordsworth thought poetry could do for the modern age.

Historians of science like to talk about the mechanization of the world picture — that is, an increasing tendency to see the world as if it were a machine. The story of modernity is, as everyone knows, bound up with the rise of empirical science during the scientific revolution. And the scientific revolution was itself tied up with new instruments that were used to measure, quantify, and magnify: modern cartography, the clock, the barometer, the telescope, the microscope, linear perspective, and eventually technologies such as the steam engine, the telegraph, and industrial machinery. The so-called hylozoistic universe — the soul-infused universe of desire and intelligence and sympathies — yielded to the inanimate world of mechanistic structures and mathematized qualities.

For Plato and Aristotle and Calcidius, down to Dante, the heavens were crystalline spheres, moved by the worshipful outpouring of angelic intellects. By the time of Wordsworth's writing, the ancient and medieval fabric of the heavens had already been unraveling. Galileo, with his famous telescope, had pried into the perfect regions of the heavens, finding stars which had been too faint to see with the unaided eye. Galileo also found that there were spots on the sun, and that they moved across the surface. All of this strengthened his then-controversial conviction that studying the properties of ordinary earthly bodies could afford an understanding of what nature was universally like.

Such statements are obvious to us, but for someone like Dante, who was moved to rapture through the contemplation of the artistry of the heavenly realm, the discovery of moons orbiting Jupiter would have meant that our moon — which had been thought mysterious, the boundary of the realm of air and ether — was now downgraded to one among many stones darting in and out of a larger body. And, crushingly, Newton's proof that the elliptical orbits of planets were due to universal gravitation meant that planets fell through space in just the same way a terrestrial projectile — say, a ball of various sizes — fell toward the earth. All this meant that the operations of the heavens could no longer be seen as designed to display a harmonic pattern. Apparently their paths were not laid out to figure forth Platonic solids, as Kepler had suggested, and their motion was not the propulsion due to the outpouring of love from intelligent beings. Space was just made up of a bunch of rocks orbiting about, chemical reactions.

In other words, within the changing world picture — from the old circular, ritualistic cosmos to the mechanistic world of Newtonian impetus — you could say that the perception of the world went from a world of circles, dancing within circles, to a world of straight lines and force, a world in which objects keep moving forever in a straight line unless some force intervenes to alter their course. That's my big point: the cosmology goes from a circle to a line, or to an arrow, a vector. Indeed, John Donne famously lamented that the circles had been broken, by which he meant that the medieval model and all of its interlocking harmonic perfection was falling apart. I'll skip the Donne quotation; if you want to get infinitely depressed about the loss of ancient cosmology, let me know and I'll read it to you in the question-and-answer session.

Or, as C. S. Lewis once put it: "The process whereby man has come to know the universe is from one point of view extremely complicated; from another it is alarmingly simple. We can observe a single one-way progression." At the outset, Lewis says, the universe appeared packed with will, intelligence, life, and positive qualities. Every tree is a nymph, and every planet a god. Man himself is akin to the gods. The advance of knowledge gradually empties this rich and genial universe, first of its gods, then of its colors, smells, sounds, and taste, finally of solidity itself, as solidity was originally imagined.

And all of this might be more significant than we would think at first. If the cosmic imaginary — a sort of background picture of how the world works — changed from the circle to the line, then the assumptions about how history ought to work and what human flourishing ought to look like could also change. As Lewis put it: "Our assumption that everything is provisional and soon to be superseded, that the attainment of goods we have never yet had, rather than the defense and conservation of those we have already, is the cardinal business of life, would most shock and bewilder our ancestors if they could visit ours."

Indeed, the musicologist Karol Berger has argued that this was the age in which musical modernity truly began — the era in which Bach's cycle became Mozart's arrow. What he means by that is that there was a fundamental shift, not just in how the world was thought to function, but in what was beautiful and desirable. What was beautiful now were the forces of Newton: force, speed, velocity, increasing momentum. If the world was nothing but a bunch of hard, colorless balls — atoms — that collide and interact with one another in mechanical operations, why shouldn't we just grab hold of the levers and make the world into what we wanted it to be in the first place?

Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised, then, that, armed with this new linear and dynamic vision of time and history and human purpose, the eighteenth century was the great age of revolutions and progress, as well as the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. By 1800 in England, when Watt's patent expired, there were 450 Watt engines, totaling 7,500 horsepower, and over 1,500 Newcomen engines built in the UK alone — so 2,000 machines built in about three decades. These machines were used mainly in mining, but also later in mills, where they became Cartwright's power loom. And so resources were being dug up from deep within the earth to operate machines that were working with more power than had ever existed before.

But to connect these remote country and city operations, new means of transportation were needed. The huge success of the Bridgewater Canal, which connected Manchester to the mines, inspired what has been called canal mania, from 1790 to 1810. The British canal network was expanded to four thousand miles in three decades of connecting waterways, equipped with new machines to lift heavy loads of resources, for which thousands of navvies were needed to build the canals.

Little wonder, too, that this period was also a great period of urbanization. The population of London around 1700 was 500,000 people. Just to give you a point of reference: Charlotte, which is the fastest-growing city in the United States, added 25,000 people in the past three years; London added 130,000 in a similar period. By the end of the century — that is, by the time Wordsworth was writing his sonnet — the city's population surpassed one million. Just imagine if New York or Mexico City or Shanghai doubled in size over the next couple of decades. The country was being connected to the city, and the resources of remote places were being hauled into cities where they were processed, refined, and then exported.

No wonder, then, that writers in the nineteenth century kept talking about how things kept speeding up. The French man of letters Chateaubriand, who lived through the Revolution, wrote that old men of his age belonged to a different race from the human race among which he ended his days. George Eliot put it in Middlemarch that she wished she could have written like an older author, like Fielding, who would chat with us in the ease of his fine English — but she can't. Fielding lived when the days were longer, when summer afternoons were spacious, and the clock ticked slowly in the winter evenings.

As Nietzsche put it, as far back as the 1880s, this is one of the fundamental characteristics of modernity: "One is ashamed of resting, and prolonged reflection almost gives people a bad conscience. One thinks with a watch in one's hand, even as one eats one's midday meal while reading the latest news of the stock market. One lives as if one might always miss out on something." Virtue has come to consist of doing something in less time than anyone else.

These writers would sometimes say that they felt doubly old — not just because they had aged, but because the world had changed, and not just because the world had changed, but because the rate of change had changed. In other words, it felt to them like time itself was accelerating. Even Newman felt it. Cardinal Newman: "God is still here. He still whispers to us. He still makes signs to us. But his voice is so low, and the world's din is so loud, and his signs are so covert, and the world is so restless, that it is difficult to determine when he addresses us and what he says." That's from his sermon "Waiting for Christ."

In 1761, the spokesman of the century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, summed up what all of this felt like in his sentimental novel Julie, or the New Heloise — an epistolary novel in which a young man leaves his small town in the mountains to seek the urban opportunities of Paris, and writes a series of letters home to his beloved about what it felt like to be in Paris. This is how Rousseau sums it up: "Everyone constantly places himself in contradiction with himself, and everything is absurd, but nothing is shocking, because everyone is accustomed to everything." This is a world in which the good, the bad, the beautiful, the ugly, truth, virtue, have only a local and limited existence.

Anyone who has spent any time in a big city — Rome, Paris, Chicago — knows these feelings well. But early in the eighteen hundreds these feelings and experiences were new, and still being thought through. Only later, at the end of this century of industrialization and urbanization, did some sociologists, like Georg Simmel, begin to put all of this into words. In Simmel's analysis, when modern urban spaces fully came into being, they created a paradoxical matrix. On the one hand, there was a new sense of facelessness — that my own personality, my identity, was lost. I became my role. In a little village, you might be Tom the town beggar, or Meg the teacher, or Joe the baker; but in a city you're just a drunk, or a mechanic, or a salesman. And so in urban space you become indistinguishable from your work function in life.

But at the same time, this creates a keener awareness that there's a real you, backstage somewhere. And sometimes this makes you want to act out, to demonstrate to all those faceless people who surround you that you are more than your function, more than your role. This is certainly why we put bumper stickers on our cars, or label all of our computers, which look identical, with our stickers — like, no, there's a real me backstage. And sometimes this makes you want to act out, to demonstrate to all those faceless people that there is a real you. And so perhaps you do act out and make a show to express yourself.

Ironically, though, within this huge social cyclone, as Rousseau called it, in which all of these spiritually starved people are acting out, we get used to seeing these displays of self-expression — the singing drunk in Dostoevsky, the woman who has dressed to attract attention, also in Dostoevsky. And this creates an environment in which we're even more cynical and blasé than before. Because all day, every day, I am bombarded with people — people I will see momentarily and then never see again. This creates a sense of cynicism in which I pay attention but then quickly detach, because I've got to pay attention to something else.

At the same time, there was such a sense of impermanence within a city. So many people were here for quick schemes of financial gain. You weren't born here. You didn't want to die here. You had no family members. You were anonymous. You could go anywhere at any time. And thus you get used to viewing other people as exchange functions — as people who, under the right circumstances, will sell you what you want or buy what you want to sell them. All of life becomes negotiation. All of life becomes submitted to the quantitative laws of exchange.

In light of all this, what was the poet to do? Well, one response was the wild-eyed condemnation of the zealous prophet — someone like William Blake, who in his 1794 Songs of Experience, which he printed and illustrated himself (a DIY printing), said this about London, in the poem called "London":

I wander thro' each charter'd street, Near where the charter'd Thames does flow, And mark in every face I meet Marks of weakness, marks of woe. In every cry of every Man, In every Infant's cry of fear, In every voice, in every ban, The mind-forg'd manacles I hear.

Ten years later, Blake was even stronger in his language of condemnation. This is from "Auguries of Innocence":

A Robin Red breast in a Cage Puts all Heaven in a Rage. A dove house fill'd with Doves & Pigeons Shudders Hell thro' all its regions. A dog starv'd at his Master's Gate Predicts the ruin of the State. A Horse misus'd upon the Road Calls to Heaven for Human blood. Each outcry of the hunted Hare A fibre from the Brain does tear.

And it goes on like that for another hundred lines — "He who shall hurt the little Wren / Shall never be belov'd by Men." For Blake, then, who had lived through the changes that unfolded in the second half of the eighteenth century, London had reached a point of apocalyptic evil, in which only the prophetic voice, calling from eternity, speaking with awe and terror, could wake up the world again.

But around the same time there was another poet, a decade younger than Blake, who hadn't grown up in London, and who carried with him a more optimistic approach to the world's woes. This poem is called "London, 1802." Guess who it's written by:

Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour: England hath need of thee: she is a fen Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen, Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower, Have forfeited their ancient English dower Of inward happiness. We are selfish men; Oh! raise us up, return to us again; And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.

That's Wordsworth, of course. What accounts for the difference? Wordsworth was a country boy who grew up in the Lake District, in the small town of Cockermouth, in a house that had a long terraced garden behind it that slowly descended to the River Derwent, whose gurglings he fell asleep to as a child. As you've gathered from The Prelude, Wordsworth as a child played all day long in the surrounding countryside. He stole eggs, trapped birds, hung from mountain precipices, ran through fields when the wind was blowing through them, and stole boats to row on mountain lakes at midnight. In other words, Wordsworth grew up in a region of the world yet untouched by the urbanization of modernity, far from the madding crowd, and thus almost by accident he received the sort of education which Rousseau would have approved of — Rousseau, who put it down as the fundamental axiom of his philosophy: "Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man." The cities were degenerate, Rousseau thought, but nature was caring and generous.

And Wordsworth, as he is eager to show, was better connected to the natural world than any man of his age. Not only did he grow up in the Lake District, and later move back to the Lake District, where he lived at Dove Cottage in Grasmere — where he wrote "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," the "Ode: Intimations of Immortality," "My Heart Leaps Up," The Prelude, "The World Is Too Much With Us" — but he was also a great walker throughout his life. He would sometimes walk up to thirteen leagues per day. A league is three miles; that's how far you can walk in an hour. Thirty-nine miles a day. In 1790 he made a great tour of France on foot, intentionally avoiding going about by coach, as a poet of the previous generation, Thomas Gray, had done. He would later spend time in Italy, France, Germany, and Switzerland. His disciple Thomas De Quincey reckoned that Wordsworth walked approximately one hundred and seventy-five thousand miles over the course of his life.

In this way, Wordsworth had been gifted with the ideal Rousseauian education. But at the same time, Wordsworth kept feeling, even as a boy, a special calling, something pursuing him — a call not just to experience the natural world, but to reach down within and find words to talk about it. While Wordsworth's first era, his Lyrical Ballads, was what you could call Rousseauian poetry, his next era was metaphysically and epistemologically more ambitious. In other words, he went from the psychological concern of retuning man to himself by means of returning to the natural world, to believing that being attentive to nature helps us find something deeper down and further in than a merely natural phenomenon.

It would seem that Wordsworth's friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge had begun to rub off on him. Although Wordsworth was a better craftsman, Coleridge was probably the deeper thinker. For Coleridge, the world is a great book of symbols — that is, of natural phenomena that somehow, some way, resonate and awaken some inner part within us. When we look at the moon over a sea, or a waterfall, or a cliff, or a skylark, or a nightingale, we sense a corresponding quality within. The world is like a tuning fork which, brought near to a second tuning fork — in this case, our hearts — causes the latter to vibrate as well. Inspired by what we see, we reach down into the inner depths and, if we are able, pull out words or images or chords and scales for what we find — words or pictures or sounds we did not previously know we had. And in this way the natural world draws out something that had been deeper down and hidden within.

And this is why, when you look at a truly great painting — even some very ordinary landscape, like Constable's painting of Salisbury — you have an incredible experience. On the one hand, it looks so plain and quotidian and everyday. But at the same time it seems saturated with a quality that makes it realer, denser, and slower than anything that could just show up in ordinary life. The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge once described the experience he had one melancholic evening when he looked up at a huge moon hanging over the sea at night. He later wrote about it in his diary: "In looking at objects of nature while I am thinking, as at yonder moon dim-glimmering through the dewy windowpane, I seem rather to be seeking, as it were asking, a symbolical language for something within me that already and forever exists, than observing anything new. Even when the latter is the case, yet I still have an obscure feeling, as if the new phenomenon were the dim awaking of a forgotten or hidden truth of my inner nature." (Is that how you write in your diary? "As at yonder moon, dim-glimmering through the windowpane…")

In this way the natural world is like a musical score, and the human heart that experiences it is like the orchestra. What was black and white and static becomes the tuneful, dynamic experience of music, with its pitches high and low. What emerges from the performance is something more real, more alive than what is recorded on the page. In a similar way, Wordsworth — by being immersed within the natural world, allowing his unusually sensitive disposition to record the accompanying sensations, but then, after recollection and study, pulling it back out of him — is able to elevate the experience of the natural world beyond something merely natural.

Imagine being in a field of long grasses during a summer evening, when a breeze comes through the meadow and you watch and feel as the pattern of wind plays out among the whole field in pulsing rhythms. This is already an extraordinary experience. But what we find within is something we hardly have a name for: the desire to run, to be as free as the wind. We feel that the whole field amplifies some interior disposition.