Wordsworth's mission to his age

Abstract

Introduction: As we near the middle of the Eighteenth Century, we find that English Literature is affected by the great changes that are occurring in the industrial, religious and political worlds, and that it flows in two great channels; one marked by a cold, intellectual, cynical temper, having an artificial mode of writing, Dryden, Pope and Johnson being typical representatives; the other, the outcome of a revolt against the earlier standards of the century, is a literature purified by the love of nature, the new sympathy for suffering and the new spirit of democracy.