Surprised by Joy

By the time Wordsworth composed this sonnet on the dynamics of grief and joy, he, alongside compatriots like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, had created a new literary movement that radically and controversially pushed British poetry away from the Neo-Classical templates that had defined it for more than a century. In promoting this new approach, named Romanticism, Wordsworth proposed poetry should reject ornate rhetoric and obscure allusions. Instead, poems should depict the universality of human emotions, elevate everyday life, and glory in the power and majesty of nature. Romantics wanted poetry to be accessible and inviting, and for readers to see their own experiences portrayed with gravity.  

As Wordsworth explains in the provocative Preface that appeared in the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, the collection that became the cornerstone of Romantic poetry, he aimed “to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible in a selection of language really used by men [...] ordinary things should be presented to the mind in a heightened aspect” (Wordsworth, William. “Preface to Lyrical Ballads.