spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings

I very much disagree that Wordsworth sees writing poetry as a passive experience. In fact, I think Wordsworth takes pride in the active thinking that goes into his poetry. I would break Wordsworth's view of the process of writing poetry into three stages: 1) the emotion which stimulates the action (see the top of p. 359 in Wu Anthology), 2)the meditation of the feelings or emotions, and 3) the writing of the poem. Only one of these stages, the first, is passive. It is in the second stage that poet emerges and separates himself from other sentient beings. It is the modifying sentence after the famous line, "all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings," where Wordsworth outlines the highly active role the poet assumes:

"But though this be true, poems to which any value can be attached were never produced on any variety of subjects but by a man who, being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility, had also thought long and deeply."

This second stage, the thinking-long-and-deeply-stage, is to Wordsworth a very active one. Feeling is involuntary, but heavy thinking (about feeling) is work, worthy of a poet. The commoner passively feels. The poet passively feels, and very actively works those feelings into words.