This essay argues that although Ruskin’s formulation of the pathetic fallacy in Modern Painters III is sometimes seen to mark an anti-Romantic turn in his thought, the problem that Ruskin faces can already be discerned in Wordsworth and has its roots in the subject/object divide characteristic of the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution; this is a problem, moreover, that continues to affect twentieth-century poetry. Ruskin’s concern with the pathetic fallacy emerges from a religious crisis that, though personal, coincides with a crisis of modernity affecting his culture and society. The essay explores Ruskin’s ambivalence vis-à-vis the pathetic fallacy, and then turns to Wordsworth’s sonnet “The world is too much with us” and to his Preface to Lyrical Ballads. It concludes by examining how the pathetic fallacy is confronted in Wallace Stevens’s modernist poem “The Snow Man.”