The world according to Wordsworth

Do Wordsworth’s poetic dictums – stemming from his fascination with both inner and outer worlds - still hold true today?  How about "All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility"? David Biespiel at the Oregonian thinks so. In his most recent piece, he examines how Wordsworth’s focus on the connection between the literary and the literal has shaped the paths of poets since his 18th century debut:

Wordsworth's best writing values the second two lines' spontaneity and feel for common life. He emphasizes a correspondence between nature and the inner life -- with the self and the imagination supreme. This, alone, is his greatest argument against Pope's poetry of Augustan authority. For Wordsworth, poetry is not an argument -- as it was for Pope and George Herbert and Anne Bradstreet. Instead, poetry is a mood, an emotion and a way of feeling that distills experience. Wordsworth's definition of poetry, in fact, has come to dominate the thinking and the making of poetry in English for two centuries . . .

(Read Biespiel's Poetry Magazine feature on US poets political involvement (or lackthereof) here)