Superficially, “Nutting” tells the simple story of an adolescent boy who gathers hazelnuts, but this is one of those poems that nearly begs for a more symbolic, less literal interpretation. Consider the language of this poem carefully. What is the central metaphor upon which much of the imagery is based? Why does the speaker (who in this case seems to be Wordsworth himself) describe how he felt pain near the end of the poem?
The sonnet is a traditional poetic form that most people have heard of. Up through Elizabethan times, the sonnet was used almost exclusively for poem that dealt with passionate love (whether sexual or platonic, and whether happy or unhappy); Shakespeare alone wrote 154 of them that we know of. By Wordsworth’s time, the sonnet had been out of fashion for a century, but Wordsworth made it popular again by using it in new ways and for new purposes. “The World is Too Much With Us” is a sonnet, but its purpose is social commentary, not love. According to this sonnet, why is Wordsworth upset with his fellow English citizens? How does the sonnet form help him convey his disappointment and frustration?
Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, first published in 1798, is one of the most important volumes of poetry ever published. It ushered in the literary movement later known as English Romanticism and utterly changed the popular conception of what poetry is. In the second edition, published in 1800, Wordsworth added (without Coleridge’s direct input) a long preface in which he attempts to explain the ideas that he and Coleridge shared about poetry. (Wordsworth later added an “appendix” to the preface, then an “essay supplementary to the preface,” and in 1815 a new preface entirely.) About a decade and a half later, Coleridge released his Biographia Literaria, a book largely devoted to the proposition that Wordsworth had gotten it wrong. Regardless, the ideas Wordsworth offers in the preface are at once revolutionary, fascinating, and deeply problematic. Consider any of them and suggest why they inspire such passionate disagreement.