Nix, Sarah

English

North Georgia College & State University: Digital Commons

University of North Georgia
Nighthawks Open Institutional Repository
Department of English Capstone Abstracts Department of English
Spring 2019
Experiences of the Innocent in Wordsworth's
Poetry
Sarah Nix
University of North Georgia, sjcarn7063@ung.edu
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Recommended Citation
Nix, Sarah, "Experiences of the Innocent in Wordsworth's Poetry" (2019). Department of English Capstone Abstracts. 33.
https://digitalcommons.northgeorgia.edu/eng_capstone/33
Sarah Nix 
Title: Experiences of the Innocent in Wordsworth’s Poetry 
Wordsworth often incorporates children in his poetry as beings essentially synonymous with nature, 
who are able to understand life in ways far superior to adults because of a lack of worldly experience. 
He suggests that their innocence gives them an undefiled insight to certain eternal truths such as 
love and death. The children in Wordsworth’s poetry are described as hopeful, joyous, untainted 
individuals who are able to face adversity head-on because of their closeness to nature. Wordsworth 
generally writes adults as individuals who have forgotten the divinity of nature because experience 
has tarnished their ability to comprehend eternal truths that children are still in tune with. Despite 
Wordsworth’s claim that children are essentially innocent, these children are not innocent all; in fact 
they have developed such deep understandings of love and death because of extremely traumatic 
experiences, making them more like adults than Wordsworth claims. The children in Wordsworth’s 
poetry are manifestations of his own understanding of love and death, incorporating some of his 
biography and revealing that these children are more like adults, specifically Wordsworth himself, 
than if we take the poet at his word. Clearly, the children in his poems do not develop a vast 
understanding of complex eternal truths through simply being innocent, but because they have 
overcome difficult situations, they serve as a representation of Wordsworth’s own epiphanies which 
he acquired through personal tragic life experiences. 
 


Experiences of the Innocent in Wordsworth\u27s Poetry

https://digitalcommons.northgeorgia.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1032&amp;context=eng_capstone

Experiences of the Innocent in Wordsworth\u27s Poetry

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