William Wordsworth was one of the founders of the literary movement we now call
Romanticism, a period covering (roughly) the years 1790 to 1824. One of the most prominent features of Romantic poetry – that means poetry from the Romantic period, not that lovey-dovey stuff you see on greeting cards – is an obsession with nature; there are a whole lot of poems about mountains, flowers, birds, you name it. In addition to talking about nature, the Romantics also spent a lot of time on gross inequalities among social classes, industrialization, the government, etc. In many ways, they resemble a lot of our modern-day advocates for the environment and social equality.
William Wordsworth, the biggest nature-lover of them all, lived most of his life in a rural part of northern England called the
Lake District, a land of beautiful hills, vales, and lakes. If you head over to "Best of the Web," you can see some pictures of Wordsworth's beloved Lake District. Having grown up and lived in one of the most beautiful places in England, it's no surprise that Wordsworth was worried about the potential destruction of that landscape (through deforestation, urbanization, etc.) and about humanity's increasing inability to appreciate it.
It is humanity's inability to "feel" nature that most concerns the speaker of "The World is too Much with Us," a poem Wordsworth probably wrote in 1802 but didn't publish until 1807. The speaker claims that our obsession with "getting and spending" has made us insensible to the beauties of nature. "Getting and spending" refers to the consumer culture accompanying the Industrial Revolution that was the devil incarnate for Wordsworth and other "lake poets" like
Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Only something as malevolent as that evil red guy with horns and a pitch-fork could make people insensible to something as beautiful as (hold your breath) the wind! But that's just it. Wordsworth's point is that our obsession with "getting and spending" has made it impossible for us to appreciate the simple beauties of the world around us.