For centuries English poetry - and not only English either - was wedded closely to nature and that seemed in the "natural" course of things. A whole culture of the seasonal rounds, birds, trees and plants could be taken for granted as part of the currency of everyday living and of the imagery of verse. Now, however, poetry has become largely urban, though this may be as much fashion as necessity.
Jonathan Bate doesn't just trace the Romantic tradition of nature-writing to its source, he also analyses an entire sensibility which has somehow become almost alien to the average reader of today, and the role which poetry can play in restoring the Earth to those who feel they have lost touch with it. Keats, Wordsworth, Hardy rub shoulders with 20thcentury thinkers such as Heidegger and even Bachelard.