I noticed this today at Althouse:

[Chris Williamson was talking] with Robert Greene, who has a new book called “The Law of the Sublime” (commission earned). Maybe he’s got the answer to our problem of colorlessness.

Williamson prompts: “You talk about sort of pagan time, pagan religions, this sense of so much more wonder, so many more unanswered questions, the opportunity to use story and narrative and personification. It’s the gods fighting that’s made the lightning, how much easier it must have been to have been infused by life. Should we all become pagans again? Is that the answer? Can we just do that?”

Greene responds: “I would love it if we would. I’m down. If you want to make a pagan commune somewhere, I’ll join. I would because I’ve always felt myself to be pagan. I’ve always, when I see, when I go to the British Museum and I see that section on Assyrian [artifacts], I see some of those massive sculptures of like half human, half tiger, lions, whoa, I feel like it’s expressing something so powerful in me. I’ve always been deeply, deeply attracted to the designs, to the things of like the, in the Aborigines, their little paintings that they make of, you know, the waves inside of animals, something. It seems more alive. It seems like something so powerful and so direct.”

I don’t know about you, but when I read that I immediately thought “Wordsworth, ‘The World Is Too Much With Us.'” Perhaps it’s a small nitpicky point I’m making. But Greene’s thoughts so closely parallel that poem of Wordsworth’s, yet when I looked at the interview I saw not a single reference to Wordsworth or to the antiquity of the thoughts Greene himself was expressing (at least, I couldn’t find any – it’s a long long interview and perhaps I missed something).

Why does this absence bother me? Well, as a poetry lover, it just does – but it also indicates a cultural illiteracy that’s commonplace even among the highly educated. After all, Wordsworth is – or used to be – a big part of the Western canon. I had to memorize that poem (along with so many others) in junior high school in a NYC public school. Wordsworth was the founder of English Romanticism, and as such was an extremely important figure:

William Wordsworth was one of the founders of English Romanticism and one its most central figures and important intellects. He is remembered as a poet of spiritual and epistemological speculation, a poet concerned with the human relationship to nature and a fierce advocate of using the vocabulary and speech patterns of common people in poetry.

And “The World Is Too Much With Us,” a sonnet of which I’m not inordinately fond but which I can still recite from memory, goes like this, which seems to track very very closely with the point Greene is trying to make. It was written in 1802, well over two hundred years ago:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.