Wordsworthian Aesthetics: Beyond Nature Towards Humanism

William Wordsworth is a great English Romantic poet, and he is now considered by some Wordsworthians to be placed just below Shakespeare and Milton in rankings of the great English poets. A whole year of study on Wordsworth leads the author to such a conviction: Wordsworth's greatness rests upon his humanistic concerns for the living state of men in an era of capitalist industrialization developing on its full fledge when it is also an era destitute of poetic spirit, and his strenuous aesthetic efforts to enable men to poetically dwell on the earth. However, in the Chinese context in particular. Wordsworth's humanism has long been overshadowed in the Wordsworthian circle by an overwhelming body of what Mr. Luo Yimin would have called "incomplete and unsatisfactory" interpretations, which culminated to diminish the distinctiveness and greatness of Wordsworth.To do fairness to Wordsworth, the author calls on a recapturing of his humanism. A good understanding of it is understood in this paper as a first step on the right path of interpreting the poet. This paper is devoted to highlighting Wordsworth's humanism by scrutinizing the interrelationship between his humanistic concerns and his aesthetic innovations, the two most noteworthy merits of the poet. For such, the paper first retraces the evolving history of Wordsworth traveling beyond his love of nature towards that of man. Then it investigates the general socio-politico-intellectual contexts to account for Wordsworth's transforming, but not abandoning, his political fervor into poetic strength. Subsequently, it discusses Wordsworth's aesthetic innovations, and exemplifies through a reading of "Tintern Abbey" Wordsworth's accomplishment of his aesthetic remedy. In so doing, the author argues that it is "incomplete and unsatisfactory" to characterize Wordsworth as a reactionary or passive Romantic poet, to dub him simply as a "nature poet", to accuse him of being hostile to the urban and industrial civilizations, or to deem his aesthetic endeavors as only culminating in what Keats called the "egotistical sublime".