Wordsworth

We're reading Wordsworth in my English class and I still haven't decided what my "position" on him is (not that I have to have one).  I don't think I have to agree with all the sentiments in it to like it, just like (for instance) you don't have to agree with all of Tolstoy's opinions on history and philosophy and so forth to appreciate War and Peace.

I was looking at Tintern Abbey the other day and there are a lot of things in it that I could think are really worthwhile to say, provided that they are not all-encompassing and absolute statements about the nature of reality, but I am having difficulty making up my mind (sure, I can interpret them to be read in a particular sense, but is this an interpretation that will be shared communally?).

For instance, Wordsworth's anti-intellectualism.  One who is anti-intellectual is not a stupid person (necessarily) but one who maintains that truth is not to be found by means of the exercise of the reason and intellect, but rather by means of something else, such as the emotions or the will, or some other faculty.  For Wordsworth it is feeling, affection, mood or something of that sort.  In line forty, when he calls the world "unintelligible" - is this his way of saying that the world is so difficult to understand that it is an acceptable hyperbole to say that it is unintelligible?  Or is he making a strict philosophical statement that it is vain to attempt to understand the world by human reason and intellect?  The former I can live with, as the non-rational is an important part of human life, and also that to realize that it is difficult to figure out what the world means is significant considering that there are strict rationalists who claim that it is quite easy.  The latter I must object to on philosophical and theological grounds as it does not give reason its due, and because I must maintain that it is possible for human reason unaided by revelation to infer from creation the existance of a god (i.e. God - see Romans 1:20).

For another example, Wordsworth's city-hatred.  Is he saying that cities are bad because they are easily corrupted by defects which are harmful - in which case it is not cities that are bad but the corruption - or is he saying that cities by their very nature do violence to human nature?  The former I can accept, but the latter I must object to on account of the communal nature of man and on account of the Heavenly Jerusalem of Revelation.

Go ahead and read the poem and tell me which one you think.  You don't have to be an English lit expert or a philosophy major or anything (I get the feeling that Wordsworth probably wouldn't have liked that attitude anyway).