The World Is Too Much With Us Wordsworth Analysis

A number of poems written during the Romantic period in Europe was in response to the Industrial Revolution and the growing disconnect of faith and spirituality in peoples lives. People moved from a mostly agriculture society to living in urban, industrial settings were they were more interested in working long hours and earning a living. Poets like William Wordsworth and John Keats used their literary works to rebuke society and the industrial movement in their poems such as The World Is Too Much with Us, and Ode on a Grecian Urn. In William Wordsworth’s poem The World Is Too Much with Us is his response to the diminished belief in faith and spirituality. The second line in the poem addresses this “Getting and spending,” (Wordsworth, line 2) brings light to how people were preoccupied with working long hours and the benefits of industry. Wordsworth believes that people have lost touch with nature and God, “We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!” (Wordsworth, line 4), their hearts once filled with faith for God now filled with an appetite for wealth and industry. People were lost and “out of tune;” (Wordsworth, …show more content…
The poem is responding to the present society’s rapidly changing life with its importance on wealth and industry. These objects of true beauty and that stand the test of time have no significance to this industrial society; the Grecian urn is something that is constant and eternal. This work of art cannot be manufactured or reproduced, “Of marble men and maidens overwrought” (Keats, line 42). When you look upon true beauty, it should move to society to dreams and aspirations. The industrial era was not producing anything that would evoke thought it was fleeting. Keats closes his poem with “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” (Keats, line 49), the ugliness that the Industrial Revolution, the dark, smoky urban cities were false and