“The world is too much with us” is a sonnet by William Wordsworth, published in 1807, is one of the central figures of the English Romantic movement. The poem laments the withering connection between humankind and nature, blaming industrial society for replacing that connection with material pursuits. Wordsworth wrote the poem during the First Industrial Revolution, a period of technological and mechanical innovation spanning the mid 18th to early 19th centuries that thoroughly transformed British life.
