ABSTRACT
William Wordsworth discovered childhood as the great source of inspiration, the primal force which drives all creativity. He was interested in the consciousness of childhood because he connected it deeply with the consciousness of the poet. He understood how the world becomes suffused with our earliest images, how we drink in with the mother's milk-symbolically, maybe even literally-our earliest impressions, and see the world ever after through those primal lenses. The source of our creativity becomes more remote as we grow away from childhood and from our self in nature; yet, we continue to depend on these early "spots" of memory for our poetic images and for our truest moments of feeling. And if we lose touch with our childhood memories, from which all our feeling-infused thinking derives. Certainly we find shadows of Experience in the poems of Innocence, as mentioned earlier, and glimmers of Innocence in the voices and images of the poems of Experience.
