Wordsworth and the Enlightenment: Nature, Man, and Society in the Experimental Poetry

This book provides a new context for understanding Wordsworth's major poetry by examining the poet's response to Enlightenment attitudes toward nature and society. Alan Bewell argues that at the core of Wordsworth's poetry is an anthropological vision, a concern with how human beings first made the transition from nature to society.

In substantially new interpretations of the early Prelude and many of the shorter poems, Bewell suggest that Wordsworth's major objective as a poet was to writ...