In response to urbanization, he felt the need to create poetry that would be “well adapted to interest mankind permanently, and likewise important in the multiplicity and quality of its moral relations”-in other words, Wordsworth argues that his poetry can help keep humans human by bringing them back to nature. In his “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads,” Wordsworth highlights that his nature-centered poems have a “worthy purpose” in their potential to reverse the effects of urban life and revive dull minds: his poetry allows people to vicariously experience the profound joys of nature and be revived. He saw nature as the solution to the harms of urban life, and, thus, chose to center his Lyrical Ballads around experiences in nature. He felt the need to use the subject of nature in his poetry in order to keep his readers emotionally alive and morally sensitive. Wordsworth wrote not for himself, but for the sake of his contemporaries, whose minds he believed were dull. Wordsworth believed that this sort of fast-paced, crowded lifestyle caused people’s minds to grow numb. At the beginning of the 19th century, when Wordsworth was writing, England was moving towards industry and urbanity.
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