William Wordsworth's "The world is too much with us"

William Wordsworth (1770-1850), one of the central figures of British Romantic literature, is widely known as a nature poet. He is one of the first writers to develop a sophisticated exploration of the relationship between the natural world and the psychological, perhaps even spiritual flourishing of human beings.  This poem in particular is one of Wordsworth's most widely known sonnets, but I've included it here in Influential Lyrics for a particular reason: this poem, together with a lyric called "I wandered lonely as a cloud" which we'll consider in the next episode, will help illustrate a sea-change in much of Western culture that happened in the late 18th and early 19th centuries and that was a driving force of Romantic period poetry in English and that still echoes through economic, political, and environmental thinking in the 21st century.