The English poet who felt the lakes and mountains much as Walt Whitman felt the American crowd and, as WJ put it, discerned "a limitless significance in natural things," turned 250 in 2020. In recognition of his poetic and human achievement BBC 4 produced In Wordsworth's Footsteps. I just listened to it, waiting for the sun, and look forward to discussing it next week with our Lyceum guest Richard Eldridge. Seems to me he was fundamentally a philosopher of Experience in the Jamesian radical empiricist mode, who understood that the distinctively interior/subjective imprint of the small but significant episodes of our lives is (should be) the heart of philosophy.
As Wordsworth walked, filled with his strange inner joy, responsive thus to the secret life of nature round about him, his rural neighbors, tightly and narrowly intent upon their own affairs, their crops and lambs and fences, must have thought him a very insignificant and foolish personage. It surely never occurred to any one of them to wonder what was going on inside of him or what it might be worth. And yet that inner life of his carried the burden of a significance that has fed the souls of others, and fills them to this day with inner joy. On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings
Another literary walker, Robert Louis Stevenson, put it more pithily. "To miss the joy is to miss all." If we're not attending to those distinctively personal inner springs and their natural exterior sources, we're missing it.
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