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INTRODUCTION

By John Burroughs

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N 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 is according to the wishes of the publishers, who desired that the collection should be mine in a real sense, and thus carry with it such savor of originality as one man's preferences may give to such a work. I trust I have not carried my personal likings too far, or to the point of giving expression to any mere eccentricities of taste in my selections. To make the work individual and yet of a high average of excellence has been my hope.

In such matters it all comes back after all to one's likes or dislikes. One may think he is trying the poem by the standard of the best that has been done in this line while he is only trying it by his own conception of that standard. So much of that standard as is vital in his own mind, he can apply and no more. His own individual taste and judgment, clarified and disciplined, of course, by wide reading and reflection, are his

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only guides. The standard of the best is not something that any man can apply, as he can the standard of weights and measures; only the best can apply the best.

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 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.

In a bird poem I want the real bird as a basis-not merely a description of it, but its true place in the season and in the landscape, and no liberties taken with the facts of its life history. I must see or hear or feel the live bird in the

verses, as one does in Wordsworth's "Cuckoo," or Emerson's "Titmouse" or Trowbridge's “Pewee." Lowell is not quite true to the facts when in one of his poems he makes the male oriole assist at nest building. The male may seem to superintend the work, but he does not actually lend a hand. Give me the real bird first, and then all the poetry that can be evoked from it.

I am aware that there is another class of bird poems, or poems inspired by birds, such as Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale," in which there is little or no natural history, not even of the sublimated kind, and yet that take high rank as poems. It is the "waking dream" in these poems, the translation of sensuous impressions into spiritual longings and attractions that is the secret of their power. When the poet can give us himself, we can well afford to miss the bird.

The fanciful and allegorical treatment of Nature is for the most part distasteful to me. I do not want a mere rhymed description of an object or scene, nor a fanciful dressing of it up in poetic imagery. I want it mirrored in the heart and life of the poet; true to the reality without and to the emotion within. The one thing that makes a poem anyway is emotion- the emotion of love, of beauty, of sublimity and these emotions playing about the reality result in the true Nature poetry as in Wordsworth, Emerson, and

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