What Has Man Made of Man? an Examination of Science, Technology, and Society Through the Works of W. Wordsworth

The literary Romantic Period was rife with advances in the technological and scientific sectors. On the tail end of the Enlightenment era which ushered in the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the world had become an ever-changing place with the beginnings of the profession that we today call engineering and numerous advances in astronomy and mathematics (Bunch and Hellemans 233). A common theme of W. Wordsworth was that these changes were both harmful to the human nature and alienating to the “common man.” In order to truly investigate the views of Wordsworth, one must first understand the context of the time period, and in order to do that we must first look to the Enlightenment era and the changes in thinking that it brought about.
What is known as the Enlightenment signifies the promotion of rational thinking in the eighteenth century; thinking that endorsed culture and reason, rather than nature or religion, as the grounds for solving problems and conflicts…. Wordsworth struggled with these ideas because he believed that one could only learn what it means to be human through a relationship with nature. (Mason 24)
This excerpt from The Cambridge Introduction to William Wordsworth combined with his works “The World is Too Much with Us” and “Lines Written in Early Spring” makes it very simple to see that Wordsworth was very much against the pursuit of science and technology, and believed it to be incredibly harmful to the human race. Wordsworth was a man who felt that human nature was much more spiritual than the scientific authors of the Enlightenment Age, and as such rejected the idea that life should be spent pursuing logic and reason and instead that nature and relative chaos held the key to what defines humanity. This is particularly evident in “Lines Written in Early Spring”, with its melancholic overtones lamenting “What man has made of man” (Wordsworth 280). Within the poem, he finds himself looking over nature’s beauty and its links to his

Cited: Bunch, Bryan H., and Alexander Hellemans. History Of Science And Technology : A Browser 's Guide To The Great Discoveries, Inventions, And The People Who Made Them, From The Dawn Of Time To Today. n.p.: Houghton Mifflin, 2004. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost). Web. 4 Oct. 2012. Jain, Asha, MA, and M. Phil. “Materialism and Ecological Views of Wordsworth.” Language in India: Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow 12.7 (2012): 28-34. Gale CENGAGE Learning: Literature Resource Center. Web. 4 Oct. 2012. Mason, Emma. Cambridge Introduction to William Wordsworth. n.p.: Cambridge University Press, 2010. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost). Web. 4 Oct. 2012. Ready, Robert. “Lines Written in Wordsworth.” Modern Language Studies 15.4 (1985): 225-231. JSTOR. Web. 4 Oct. 2012. Wordsworth, William. “Lines Written in Early Spring.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Ed. Julia Reidhead. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2012. 280. Print. ---. “From Preface to Lyrical Ballads, with Pastoral and other Poems (1802)”. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Ed. Julia Reidhead. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2012. 293-304. Print. ---. “The World is Too Much with Us”. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Ed. Julia Reidhead. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2012. 347. Print.