Abstract

In several places in the Lyrical Ballads William Wordsworth challenges the capitalist ideology of labor. In Wordsworth’s view one of the key weaknesses the way this ideology manifests itself in economic thought is the way it generalizes about different people and their situations. The result of such generalizations is that they miss out the different meanings people give to their economic activity and applies to them a crude classification of either rational or irrational. Wordsworth believed that this erroneous economic thinking had infected moral theory. In the Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth investigates specific instances of people for whom capitalist economic imperatives no longer make sense. The implication of these instances is that these people are being marginalized by their failure to be assimilated to alienated labor. They either fail to adapt to alienated labor or adapt to it for motives other than those prescribed by the capitalist ideology of labor. This article will show how “The Last of the Flock” gives an instance of the former kind and “Simon Lee” gives an instance of the latter. In the Lyrical Ballads morality critiques economic thought. Wordsworth uses poetry to reaffirm the authority of moral thought to inform economic thought. This is an act of rebellion against the tendency he saw in his times of economic thought to stand above moral thought.

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