Literary scholars have traditionally understood landscapes, whether natural or manmade, as metaphors for humanity instead of concrete settings for people’s actions. This book accepts the natural world as such by investigating how Anglo-Saxons interacted with and conceived of their lived environments. Examining Old English poems such as Beowulf and…[Read more]

Literary scholars have traditionally understood landscapes, whether natural or manmade, as metaphors for humanity instead of concrete settings for people’s actions. This book accepts the natural world as such by investigating how Anglo-Saxons interacted with and conceived of their lived environments. Examining Old English poems such as Beowulf and…[Read more]

Susan Fenimore Cooper’s slow-moving nature journal, Rural Hours (1850), is an education of the senses in which both author and reader learn where to look and how to look. Her creative decision represent herself as a “gleaner” and to both use and subtly subvert the seasonal cycle (so that we may see more deeply, more intimately, more truth…[Read more]

The essay takes a fresh look at Eliot’s ‘water-dripping song’ in The Waste Land. It seems impossible for the ornithologically minded Eliot not to have known that the hermit thrush’s song does not sound like dripping water. In fact, nowhere in ornithological writing — and certainly not in his source, Chapman’s Handbook of North American Birds —…[Read more]

The essay takes a fresh look at Eliot’s ‘water-dripping song’ in The Waste Land. It seems impossible for the ornithologically minded Eliot not to have known that the hermit thrush’s song does not sound like dripping water. In fact, nowhere in ornithological writing — and certainly not in his source, Chapman’s Handbook of North American Birds —…[Read more]