William Wordsworth



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William Wordsworth, considered one of the foremost English Romantic poets, composed flowing blank verse on the spirituality of nature and the wonders of human imagination. In “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” (1807), Wordsworth considers the Platonic notion that humans forget all their knowledge at birth and spend the remainder of their lives recollecting, rather than learning. Wordsworth celebrates the child, who enjoys an ecstatic communion with nature, and hopes that as an adult he can eventually recover this ecstasy by heeding intuition. (Excerpt recited by an actor.)

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Wordsworth, William; Romanticism (literature); English Literature

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