By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Nature is one of the great themes of poetry, and also provides poets with a storehouse of vivid and useful images. But what are the finest nature poems in the English language?
Whether it’s the Romantics like Wordsworth and Keats, the Victorians with their growing awareness of the natural world through geological and evolutionary scientific discovery, or more modern and contemporary poets writing about a landscape marked by suffering as well as beauty, English poets have often been drawn to the world of nature for inspiration.