Refusing to Look Away

Setting out, in September 1800, to define the character of the poet for a new age, William Wordsworth came to the conclusion that good poems could be written only by someone “who, being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility, had also thought long and deeply.” Most of us live at the mercy of our routines. We punch the clock, fret over deadlines, and fall into the algorithmic trap of doomscrolling, swiping past headline after headline, reel after reel, each bearing the day’s report of calamity and outrage. We self-soothe with empty calories: The Real Housewives, romantasy, and chill. Wordsworth’s era was different in degree but not in kind. Overwhelmed by news of foreign wars and economic collapse, his contemporaries had been reduced “to a state of almost savage torpor,” living on a toxic diet of “frantic novels, sickly and stupid German Tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse.”The poet would have to resist “this degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation.” He would remind his readers “what is really important to men,” cultivating their capacity for serious, sustained inquiry and moral reflection. At the same time, he would have to remain alert t...