Wordsworth's Common Man

"The idea of rural community is predominantly residual, but is in some limited respects alternative or oppositional to urban industrial capitalism." Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature.

The degree to which I accept 2W's project, outlined in the 1800 preface, is relative to the interpretation of the rural community's residuality. 2W sees this rustic community as oppositional to the increasing dominant culture of the urban. 2W fears that this urban culture, this "novel" culture, would abandon the poetry of the elders (read: the poetry of 2W).

Fortunately, 2W's fears were justified.

But 2W's prejudices against the urban severely limit his subject matter. His common person is the rustic common person-- a person who, thanks to the Industrial Revolution, was becoming increasingly uncommon. But was 2W really "on the side" of rural residualism or did he appropriate it, if not necessarily for commercial reasons (as Emily has suggested), than for artistic ones? 2W's project failed, at least in the United States and Britain. The rural community has dwindled and the urban community has grown into a "global" community. Paradoxically, this trend in history has fostered 2W's exceptionalism and therefore his canonization. 2W and other Romantics signify as such because they represent a conduit to a rural, natural past. But it is important to recognize that even in their own moment, the Romantic's relationship to the rustic and the natural was, rather than mimesis of the common, a denial of the real.