• Description
• Full Record
• Author Notes
• Contents
• Excerpts
• Reviews
• Summary
• A\\V Summary
• Preview
• Searching for more content…

Poems vivifying nature have gripped people for centuries. From Biblical times to the present day, poetry has continuously drawn us to the natural world. In this thought-provoking book, John Felstiner explores the rich legacy of poems that take nature as their subject, and he demonstrates their force

… More »

Poems vivifying nature have gripped people for centuries. From Biblical times to the present day, poetry has continuously drawn us to the natural world. In this thought-provoking book, John Felstiner explores the rich legacy of poems that take nature as their subject, and he demonstrates their force and beauty. In our own time of environmental crises, he contends, poetry has a unique capacity to restore our attention to our environment in its imperiled state. And, as we take heed, we may well become better stewards of the earth. In forty brief and lucid chapters, Felstiner presents those voices that have most strongly spoken to and for the natural world. Poets--from the Romantics through Whitman and Dickinson to Elizabeth Bishop and Gary Snyder--have helped us envision such details as ocean winds eroding and rebuilding dunes in the same breath, wild deer freezing in our presence, and a person carving initials on a still-living stranded whale. Sixty color and black-and-white images, many seen for the first time, bear out visually the environmental imagination this book discovers--a poetic legacy more vital now than ever.

« Less

Author: Felstiner, John

Title: Can poetry save the earth?
a field guide to nature poems

Publisher: Yale University Press

Imprint: New Haven : - Yale University Press

Pages: 396

ISBN: 0300137508, 9780300137507

Language: English

Notes: Singing ecology unto the Lord -- Anon was an environmentalist -- Blake, the Wordsworths, and the dung -- Coleridge imagining -- John Keats eking it out -- John Clare at home in Helpston -- Adamic Walt Whitman -- Syllables of Emily Dickinson -- Nature shadowing Thomas Hardy -- The world charged by Gerard Manley Hopkins -- Nature versus history in W. B. Yeats -- Robert Frost and the fun in how you say a thing -- Frost and the necessity of metaphor -- England thanks to Edward Thomas, 1914-1917 -- Wings of Wallace Stevens -- Reviving America with William Carlos Williams -- Williams and the environmental news -- D.H. Lawrence in Taormina and Taos -- Ocean, rock, hawk, and Robinson Jeffers -- Marianne Moore's fantastic reverence -- To steepletop and ragged island with Edna St. Vincent Millay -- Pablo Neruda at Machu Picchu -- Stanley Kunitz : his nettled field, his dune garden -- Things whole and holy for Kenneth Rexroth -- Theodore Roethke from greenhouse to seascape -- George Oppen's Psalm of Attentiveness -- Elizabeth Bishop traveling -- Something alive in May Swenson -- Earth home to William Stafford -- America's angst and Robert Lowell's -- Life illumined around Denise Levertov --Shirley Kaufman's roots in the air -- News of the North from John Haines -- Trust in Maxine Kumin -- Wind in the reeds in the voice of A. R. Ammons -- W.S. Merwin's motion of mind -- Zest of Galway Kinnel -- Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon at Eagle Pond Farm -- Ted Hughes capturing pike -- Derek Walcott, first to see them -- Gary Snyder's eye for the real world -- Can poetry save the earth?
Includes bibliographical references (p. 359-372) and index.

Statement of responsibility: John Felstiner

Characteristics: xiv, 396 p., [24] p.of plates :,ill. (some col.) ;,25 cm.

Author (Original Script): Felstiner, John

MARC Display»

Community Activity

• Comment
• Age
• Summary
• Notices
• Quotes
• Videos