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Wordsworth often targets sharp criticism at lukewarm gestures of welcome, which do not provide the warmth of sympathy indispensable for the affective community bond. In Book Seven of Prelude, for example, he pours scorn over the indifference that was pervasive in “the mighty concourse” during his residence in London when he was young (Wordsworth 816). Although at that time he was “well pleased to note / Among the crowd of all specimens of man”, he had already had a clear impression of the estrangement of individuals in that society:

Above all, one thought Baffled my understanding: how men lived Even next-door neighbours, as we say, yet still Strangers, not knowing each other’s name. (Wordsworth, The Prelude 817)

Wordsworth is perhaps among the first in the world to address the modern problem of strangeness in a community, where people live in the same neighbourhood without thinking of each other, without even knowing each other’s names. Such a profound indifference makes Wordsworth feel affectively walled out and frustrated, particularly in the fast-flowing crowds in London:

Thy everyday appearance, as it strikes— With wonder heightened, or sublimed by awe— On strangers, of all ages; the quick dance Of colours, lights, and forms; the deafening din;

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CONCLUSION

The analysis above testifies to the fact that William Wordsworth has contributed to the Romantic debates on the issue of strangers by conceiving of a stranger-embracing deep community. Unlike some of his contemporaries’ aversion to strangers, which seems to reveal a certain xenophobia, Wordsworth’s attitude towards strangers is much more complicated, highlighting the reciprocal interaction between the community and strangers.

Furthermore, our discussion throughout the present thesis has constantly, though sometimes implicitly, turned on William Wordsworth’s resounding question: “Who weeps for strangers?” (“George and Sarah Green” 740) Now it can be affirmed that instead of being a careless “homebody” designated by David Simpson (Romanticism 16), Wordsworth is indeed among the first to weep for them and the first to play a significant role in tackling the stranger syndrome of his era.

It is the age of Romanticism that has witnessed the raging issues of strangers and community in unprecedented depth and scope. Due to the individualistic rationalism that ran rampant in Wordsworth’s times, innumerable individuals were uprooted from the originally close-knit communities, and thus reduced to strangers wandering without any fixed and communal bonds. Sensitive to such social disasters and their own loss of spiritual anchorage with the collapse of traditional communities, intellectuals like Wordsworth found it urgent to address the issue of “how a cultural community should b本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。