Given that “Nature” is historically imbricated in the history of Christianity, the secularizing movement of modernity puts nature under intense pressure. The resulting conflicts are modeled by the United States, which authorized political revolution by invoking “the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” The American Transcendentalists extended nature as divine order and transcendent arbiter to authorize intellectual revolution, consolidating liberal Protestantism, European Romanticism, and modern science into a template for the meaning of nature in modernity; humans became not humble creatures in God’s creation but God’s avatars commanding all merely material beings. Today, as the resulting ecological collapse destabilizes inherited concepts of nature, “ecology” is offered as a replacement, even though ecology as a science cannot offer moral value or spiritual meaning. This intellectual history is traced through the founding work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who offered idealism as the engine of modernity, and three followers, Orestes Brownson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller, who variously pluralized nature into the plenitude of material forms and beings seen as vulnerable incarnations of a higher or divine life force, prefiguring the science and ethics of ecology as an aspect of, rather than replacement for, nature.

Taking its cue from Thoreau’s Walden, the Introduction characterizes the book’s subject matter and approach as “environmental philology.” This newly minted method of studying issues related to the natural world springs from the better-established, more familiar labels “environmental philosophy” and “environmental humanities.” By philology is meant simply the methods and materials that comprise the multidisciplinary field of Classics, which is the study of ancient Greek and Roman literature and culture in all its facets.

Maeve O’Brien examines the geographical isolation Plath experienced when living in in Devon, yet shows how these circumstances impacted her writing, contributing to the burst of creativity that came towards the end of her life and allowing Plath to mine her surroundings in direct ways. O’Brien shows us just how influenced by and receptive to her lived environment Plath was, and how this environment impacted on her work.

This chapter return to the soteriological arc with a discussion of sacramental imagery and aspirations of redemption and transcendence. Beginning with the Gaudete Epilogue poems and moving on River and Under the North Star, it looks at the rise in sacramental and specifically eucharistic imagery in Hughes’s poetry, arguing that the naturalization of sacramental activity in these poems authenticates human religious concerns. Sympathies between Hughes’s work and that of the American Transcendentalist, hinted at here there so far in the book, are discussed explicitly. Also making significant reference to Eliot, this chapter discusses the question of time in Hughes’s poetry, where, especially in River, it appears as something to be resisted and potentially escaped or transcended. The chapter culminates in a close reading of the poems “That Morning” and “The River.” We watch as Hughes overcomes anxieties about the destructive nature of time by cleaving ever closer to an explicitly Christian metaphysic.