Financialization and Loss of Use in Wordsworth

William Wordsworth’s sonnet “The World Is too Much with Us ” is often read as a general lament for humanity’s alienation from nature under modernity, but such readings risk flattening the poem’s sharper cultural critique. More precisely, the sonnet stages an early Romantic resistance to what might be called the abstraction of value under emergent capitalist modernity. Wordsworth’s sonnet critiques the cultural logic of early financial capitalism by opposing abstract, exchange-based value (“getting and spending”) to embodied, use-based relationships with the natural world, a loss that the poem frames as spiritual dispossession rather than mere emotional neglect.

The poem opens with a compressed diagnosis: “The world is too much with us; late and soon, / Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.” The phrase “getting and spending” gestures toward materialism, but it also invokes a circulatory economy of acquisition and expenditure that defines value only through motion and accumulation. In this sense, Wordsworth is responding to the historical rise of market abstraction in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain, when economic life increasingly depended on credit systems, speculative finance, and colonial trade rather than direct relations of labor and use. The sonnet’s complaint is not simply that people buy too much, but that value itself has become disembedded from lived, sensuous experience. Human “powers” are wasted not because labor is excessive, but because labor no longer connects the subject meaningfully to the world.

Wordsworth reinforces this critique by contrasting economic abstraction with the immediacy of natural presence. Nature in the sonnet is not decorative or symbolic; it is figured as a site of reciprocal relation. The sea “bares her bosom to the moon,” and the winds are “howling at all hours.” These images emphasize exposure, rhythm, and bodily intensity. Crucially, nature here is not owned, improved, or consumed. It exists outside the circuits of exchange value that dominate human life. The problem, then, is not that nature has disappeared, but that modern subjects lack the cultural framework to perceive it as anything other than inert background, or wrse, something to be exploited. Wordsworth’s grief is epistemological as much as ecological: the senses remain intact, but the structures that give sensation meaning have been eroded.

The sonnet’s turn to paganism is especially revealing when read this way. Wordsworth’s startling wish to be “a Pagan suckled in a creed outworn” is not mere nostalgia for myth, but a critique of Christian modernity’s alignment with abstraction and transcendence. Paganism, as imagined here, offers a cosmology in which divinity is immanent, local, and visible. Proteus and Triton are not moral authorities but embodiments of natural forces that can still be “seen.” This desire reflects a cultural longing for belief systems that anchor value in presence rather than deferred reward. In economic terms, paganism represents a world prior to the dominance of abstraction, where meaning arises from situated interaction rather than invisible systems.

Importantly, Wordsworth does not imagine reform within modern structures; his sonnet offers no programmatic solution. Instead, the poem performs a refusal. By insisting that “we are out of tune,” Wordsworth frames modernity as a problem of cultural attunement rather than individual ethics. The failure lies not in personal greed but in the collective normalization of abstraction as the primary mode of relating to the world. This refusal aligns the poem with what later cultural critics would identify as resistance to reification, the process by which social relations appear as objective, external forces beyond human control.

In this way, “The World Is too Much with Us” can be read as an early cultural critique of financialized modernity, anticipating later Marxian concerns about alienation and value. Wordsworth’s sonnet mourns not simply the loss of nature, but the loss of a cultural capacity to experience the world as something other than a field for extraction and exchange. What is “too much” is not the world itself, but a system of value that mediates every encounter, leaving humanity rich in commodities but poor in relation.