Locke asserted that we come into the world as a tabula rasa, or blank slates. Wordsworth decided against that empirical idea. He couldn’t buy into the notion that people arrive on Earth without knowledge or personhood and become fully functioning and aware only after things happen to them, for better or for worse.
Wordsworth expresses a quite opposite understanding of the state we’re in when we’re born in lines 58-65 of his famous poem, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.”
If you would like to learn more about Wordsworth’s biography, poetry, and philosophy, watch the documentary below as an optional activity. When you’re ready, go to CANVAS and complete the quiz, “Wordsworth’s Ode.”
