Man in Society — the Poetry of Reform

Abstract

Wordsworth’s concern with man in society is continued in the poems of social protest written from 1795 to 1797, particularly the female vagrant’s story in the Salisbury Plain poems, and the ‘Imitation of Juvenal’, with its attack on the rottenness and corruption of public life. But before considering the Salisbury Plain poems in detail, it is necessary to look at the remarkable circumstances of their composition. The story is well known: how Wordsworth set out with William Calvert, and was then left alone on Salisbury Plain; and how he then walked alone over the Plain, across and up to the Wye Valley, and thence to North Wales. It was perhaps the most memorable of all Wordsworth’s journeys: ‘my rambles over many parts of Salisbury Plain’, he told Isabella Fenwick in 1843, ‘left on my mind imaginative impressions the force of which I have felt to this day.’1 The period of solitude probably lasted for two or three weeks: during it the poet had visions of the ancient Britons, of human sacrifices, and of Druids; he took in sights and sounds which, as Mary Moorman points out, are brought ‘before the eye and ear with a curious melancholy vividness’.2 He also met the little girl of ‘We are Seven’, and the tinker who later became Peter Bell: by this time Wordsworth (who had probably been sleeping rough) was looking so unkempt and farouche that the tinker thought he might be a murderer, so that both poet and tinker were afraid of each other.3 KeywordsEconomic DepressionParadise LostSocial ProtestStructure SocietyHuman SacrificeThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.