Wordsworth, Bellow, and understanding multiple sclerosis

Abstract

In 1975, the American novelist and Nobel laureate Saul Bellow gave an address to the University of Chicago Board of Trustees (Chicago, IL, USA). He chose as his subject “distraction”, taking his cue from William Wordsworth's poem The world is too much with us, written in 1807. Life in England at the beginning of the 19th century was being rapidly transformed by the industrial revolution and Wordsworth lamented what he saw as a society in thrall to materialism, its citizens increasingly blind to the beauty of nature.