ABSTRACT
Wordsworth has tended to be swallowed up in a general 'Wordsworthianism' or in the anti-Wordsworthianism of those who have reacted against it. Wordsworth became part of the Wordsworthianism that has blanketed his poems and prevented them from being read, part of an urban cult of 'nature', or a chief witness against the spirit of Victorian doubt to a benevolent universe and man's place in it as favourite son. The most important voice in the twentieth century to be raised on Wordsworth's side was that of A. N. Whitehead. Whitehead's nature is not that of the Wordsworthian. Whitehead's perception has characteristic breadth and depth. The break-up of the Newtonian universe signals disturbances in every sphere of human activity: the intellectual, religious, ethical, political, and social. Middle-class moralist pressure-groups were replacing country-house managers. In Wordsworth's poem there is the rainbow and the man and the re-action that takes place when the two come together.
