John Burroughs

John Burroughs' Book of Songs of Nature: Two Hundred and Twenty-Three Poems Collected by America's Beloved Naturalist

From the author's introduction in 1901:

"In compiling this anthology of Nature poetry I have been guided entirely by my own taste in such matters; I have here gathered together such poems as I myself prefer amid the material at my disposal"...

"This collection represents on the whole my judgment of the best Nature poems at my disposal in the language. I am surprised at the amount of so-called Nature poetry that has been added to the English literature during the past fifty years, but I find only a little of it of permanent worth. The painted, padded, and perfumed Nature of so many of the younger poets I cannot stand at all. I have not knowingly admitted any poem that was not true to my own observations of Nature -or that diverged at all from the facts of the case. Thus, a poem that shows the swallow perched upon the barn in October I could not accept, because the swallow leaves us in August; or a poem that makes the chestnut bloom with the lilac -an instance I came across in my reading -would be ruled out on like grounds; or when I find poppies blooming in the corn in an American poem, as I several times have done, I pass by on the other side."