Read Aloud the Text Content

This audio was created by Woord's Text to Speech service by content creators from all around the world.

Text Content or SSML code:

Though he presumably wrote it in 1802, Wordsworth published “Westminster Bridge” in a collection titled Poems, in Two Volumes in 1807. The collection contains some of Wordsworth’s best known poems, such as “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” in which the speaker indulges in an activity typical of Wordsworth: using the “inward eye” to reflect on a moment of previous tranquility in nature. “Westminster Bridge” is one of a cluster of sonnets that focus on humanity's impact on the world, but it differs from the others in its apparent optimism. In “London, 1802,” for example, England is described as a place of “stagnant waters” and “selfish men.” In “The World Is Too Much With Us,” Wordsworth condemns the state of the English people, saying “We have given our hearts away.” William Blake's "London," written around the same time, is also decidedly darker in its depiction of the city than is this poem. Though “Westminster Bridge” acknowledges human beings’ violent impact, especially evident in cities, it also encourages its readers to revise their view of the dirty, smelly, smoky, and allaround bad industrial city. Wordsworth was a leader among England’s Romantic poets, solidifying a tradition that started with William Blake in the late 18th century and was expanded upon by poets like Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats toward the middle of the 19th century. Like his peers, Wordsworth questioned much of the established political and literary thinking of the time, especially between the 1790s and the early 1800s. His visits to France in the years following the French Revolution stoked in him a kind of democratic fervor that he would try to incorporate into his poetry. In his Preface to Lyrical Ballads, a long introduction to the 1800 version of a book that featured both his poems and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s (including “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”), he insisted that poetry “arising out of repeated experience and regular feelings” uses “a more permanent, and a far more philosophical language.” In this essay, he also famously asserted that “poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.” His goal to use the language of common people in his poetry was similar to that of one of his major influences, the 17thcentury English poet John Milton. Wordsworth’s sonnet “London, 1802,” starts with an apostrophe to Milton, and begs the author of Paradise Lost to “raise us up, return to us again; / And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.” Wordsworth’s plans to revitalize English poetry were not entirely revolutionary in nature, drawing in part on a conservative attachment to the past.