Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents vii
3. Illustrations xi
4. Preface The Poetry of Earth Is Never Dead xiii
5. Introduction Care in Such a World 1
6. PART ONE
7. “stony rocks for the conies” Singing Ecology unto the Lord 19
8. “Western wind, when will thou blow” Anon Was an Environmentalist 28
9. “The stationary blasts of waterfalls” Blake, the Wordsworths, and the Dung 34
10. “The white Eddy-rose . . . obstinate in resurrection” Coleridge Imagining 39
11. “last oozings hours by hours” John Keats Eking It Out 46
12. “Its only bondage was the circling sky” John Clare at Home in Helpston 56
13. “Nature was naked, and I was also” Adamic Walt Whitman 64
14. “Earth’s most graphic transaction” Syllables of Emily Dickinson 75
15. “sick leaves . . . storm-birds . . . rotten rose . . . rain-drop” Nature Shadowing Thomas Hardy 88
16. “freshness deep down things” The World Charged by Gerard Manley Hopkins 94
17. “O honey bees,/Come build in the empty house of the stare” Nature Versus History in W. B. Yeats 104
18. PART TWO
19. “strangeness from my sight” Robert Frost and the Fun in How You Say a Thing 115
20. “white water rode the black forever” Frost and the Necessity of Metaphor 123
21. “Larks singing over No Man’s Land” England Thanks to Edward Thomas, 1914–1917 130
22. “the necessary angel of earth” Wings of Wallace Stevens 136
23. “broken/seedhusks” Reviving America with William Carlos Williams 141
24. “source then a blue as” Williams and the Environmental News 149
25. “room for me and a mountain lion” D. H. Lawrence in Taormina and Taos 162
26. “not man/Apart” Ocean, Rock, Hawk, and Robinson Jeffers 170
27. “submerged shafts of the//sun,/split like spun/glass” Marianne Moore’s Fantastic Reverence 176
28. “There, there where those black spruces crowd” To Steepletop and Ragged Island with Edna St. Vincent Millay 184
29. “Gale sustained on a slope” Pablo Neruda at Machu Picchu 194
30. “the wild/braid of creation/trembles” Stanley Kunitz—His Nettled Field, His Dune Garden 202
31. “Bright trout poised in the current” Things Whole and Holy for Kenneth Rexroth 211
32. “I swayed out on the wildest wave alive” Theodore Roethke from Greenhouse to Seascape 216
33. “That they are there!” George Oppen’s Psalm of Attentiveness 223
34. “surprised at seeing” Elizabeth Bishop Traveling 228
35. “Why is your mouth all green?” Something Alive in May Swenson 239
36. PART THREE
37. “care in such a world” Earth Home to William Stafford 251
38. “The season’s ill” America’s Angst and Robert Lowell’s 259
39. “that witnessing presence” Life Illumined Around Denise Levertov 266
40. “the tree making us/look again” Shirley Kaufman’s Roots in the Air 275
41. “that the rock might see” News of the North from John Haines 282
42. “asking for my human breath” Trust in Maxine Kumin 290
43. “What are you doing out here/this windy” Wind in the Reeds in the Voice of A. R. Ammons 294
44. “between the earth and silence” W. S. Merwin’s Motion of Mind 301
45. “bear blood” and “Blackberry Eating” Zest of Galway Kinnell 309
46. “Kicking the Leaves” Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon at Eagle Pond Farm 318
47. “I dared not cast//But silently cast” Ted Hughes Capturing Pike 327
48. “the still pond and the egrets beating home” Derek Walcott, First to See Them 335
49. “Just imagine” Can Poetry Save the Earth? 355
50. Sources 359
51. Text Credits 373
52. Acknowledgments 378
53. Index 381