Wordsworth set up a heavy weight battle between the ideas of the Enlightenment and his own Naturalist inclinations with Expostulation and Reply. Written in 1798, Reply is a response to the Enlightenment movement, which began to appear in English literature during the mid-18th century. Immanuel Kant wrote a very influential piece in 1784 called, What is Enlightenment? The main claim of this essay is that Enlightenment was, “Mankind's final coming of age, the emancipation of the human consciousness from an immature state of ignorance and error"(Porter, The Enlightenment)1.
In Expostulation and Reply, William is having a conversation with Matthew. Matthew starts with his expostulation, saying, “Where are your books? That light bequeath’d To beings else forlorn and blind…”(Lyrical Ballads 103, L: 5-6). Here Matthew claims that wisdom comes from humanity’s use of reason, and that books are the means by which humans transfer progress “From dead men to their kind”(Lyrical Ballads 103, L: 8). He continues to explain that Wordsworth isn’t the first human to be on earth and that he should work toward some grand human purpose which was started by those before him.
William has different ideas about the human condition. In his reply, he begins by explaining that our natural senses are not our choice, and the human Will cannot affect the senses. Instead of using reason to problem solve, we humans “can feed this mind of ours, In a wise passiveness”(Lyrical Ballads 104, L: 23-24). Nature is always speaking to humanity through the senses, and in its totality it will speak more than men could ever seek to gain using reason. By just sitting on a rock, smelling a flower, gazing at trees, and listening to a babbling brook, a human can connect with the message that resides in the Natural world around him or her.
Both perspectives contribute something unique to the enlightenment debate. Matthew tends to see humanity as a unique being continually striving toward an inborn purpose, whereas Wordsworth views humans as part of a greater Natural existence. Enlightenment is achieved in one argument through man’s use of reason and innate thinking to emancipate thought. In Naturalist thinking, however, we must merely access the boundless knowledge broadcasted through Nature’s beauty to mature the collective human consciousness.
An excellent general explanation of what's at stake, here. Wordsworth's specific struggles with specific enlightenment thinkers, if you get a chance to look into them further, say in his autobiographical poem, *The Prelude,* are even more interesting.
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