Wordsworth and Burke: a Contrast

Abstract

What do Wordsworth’s life and work reveal about the nature and extent of his conservatism? Was it merely political? — a retreat for a disenchanted radical of the French Revolution? Or was it something ‘deeper, purer & higher’? — a yearning for a Golden Age vision of Old England?1 No quick and ready answer can be given to that question. It requires close study in the context of his own times as well as the whole history of English conservative thought from Hooker to Burke. Nevertheless, we have a starting point for our argument in Alfred Cobban’s book, Edmund Burke and the Revolt against the Eighteenth Century (1929), which was the first historical study to trace the different political and cultural effects of Burke’s life and work upon the ‘Lake Poets’.2 He was adamant that these Romantic writers owed their greatest intellectual debt to Edmund Burke and no other. The three Romantics started life as ardent followers of the French Revolution and scorned Burke’s rhetorical defence of the English Constitution in Church and State; Wordsworth declaring that it was ridiculous to believe ‘that we and our posterity to the end of time were riveted to a constitution by the indissoluble compact of a dead parchment’.3 They subscribed instead to the ideas of Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), who argued that ‘Man is born free but is everywhere in chains’.