Speculative Formalism: Religion and Literature for a Postsecular Age

In a sonnet written in the opening years of the nineteenth century, William Wordsworth laments that the “world is too much with us.” He found the world’s proximity to be “too much,” in part, because he felt the economics of “getting and spending” had disordered Man’s relation to Nature and the traditional attachments of the heart (1–2). Because of this “we are out of tune” and the world “moves us not” (8–9). In response to the deadening proximity of the modern economic world, Wordsworth cries out in the sonnet’s final sestet: