Nature In Literature

[Booker Man]

Hello all,

I was hoping some of you nice folk could recommend more nature themed/located works worth reading.

We've all read Jack London & Thoreau I'm sure but beyond that what are other great reads?

Deserts, Jungles, Mountains, Swamps, Oceans, Forests, Lakes, Savannahs, Coastal regions etc

Any help is greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

[The Comedian]

Well, the first author I'd look to is Edward Abbey, who wrote mostly of the Desert Southwest. His prose style should be more discussed than it is. If you haven't read him, then I suggest that you start with Desert Solitaire and move on from there.

If you like a little humor in your literature, try David James Duncan's The River Why, the setting of which occurs in the Northwest part of the US.

The essays of Loren Eiseley are great, more philosophical than most. And the work of Sigrid Olson revolves around the upper mid-west/lower Canada.

Barry Lopez's book Arctic Dreams one of the most memorable and comprehensive works to deal with the Arctic region. And Lopez is a terrific prose stylist. I'd put this work right next to Desert Solitaire in terms of its under appreciated worth.

Hope this helps!

[Whifflingpin]

Seek out Richard Jefferies

or Henry Williamson

[WyattGwyon]

Victor Hugo's Toilers of the Sea is largely one man against the elements. (Gilliatt salvages a steamship run aground in the Channel Islands to win the hand of its owner's daughter.)

In T. C. Boyle's Water Music (deserts and jungles of Africa) and Drop City (Alaska), survival in harsh environments is a major theme.

[Booker Man]

Thank you all for these wonderful recommendations!

My wishlist has gained so many new additions, I cant wait to get a few of them on my bookshelf and dig into them.

Edward Abbey and his works in particular look a fantastic read

Keep them coming!

[Sancho Panza]

Watership Down by Richard Adams seems an obvious choice.

[JuniperWoolf]

Kids' books are good for nature literature I find. Wind in the Willows, Anne of Green Gables, The Secret Garden, Watership Down, Hatchet, ect.

[The Comedian]

Edward Abbey and his works in particular look a fantastic read

You won't regret it.

I wrote a review of Desert Solitaire here on the forum some years ago. That might give you a better idea of it.

[Dark Muse]

Moby Dick
The Old Man and the Sea
The Mutiny on the Bounty Trilogy
Robinson Crusoe
Heart of Darkness

[Paulclem]

I liked Tarka the Otter, Ring of Bright Water and White Fang. Ring of Bright Water is biographical and also about otters.

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

Wordsworth is aeguably the geeatest nature poet ever. A lot of Colerdige's works deals with nature (particularly Rime of the Ancient Mariner) and almost anything by Hawthorne will at least partially have nature as a theme. Most of Melville's works deal with the sea--Moby Dick particularly has some beautifully poetic passages about the vastness of the sea.

Here's one of Wordworth's most popular poems, "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud":




I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed---and gazed---but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

[JuniperWoolf]

I was thinking, the Lord of the Rings trilogy is pretty nature-y, what with the excessive descriptions of absolutely everything including nature. Personally I like their excessive descriptions of food better, it always makes me hungry. Actually I've underlined all of the passages that deal with food and tea and whatnot, I love reading them.

[Booker Man]

Again, thank you all so very much!

I wandered lonely as a cloud, takes me back to my school days! Lord of the rings aren't my kind of books im afraid. I've read The old man and the sea & Robinson Crusoe and enjoyed both so i will look up the others Dark Muse listed.

Here are some other books i have read nature related that i enjoyed :

Lost City Of Z
The Last American Man
An Island To Oneself
Walking the Amazon
Selkirks Island
Traversa

Might not be literary classics but enjoyable none the less!

Anybody read The Desert Smells Like Rain?

Any good?

[mal4mac]

Jerome K Jerome, "Three men in a boat". The author surprised me with some wonderful musings on nature. When said musings are interrupted by farcical scenes, as they usually are, it results in some of the funniest prose I've ever read.

For "deserts" try "The Sheltering Sky" by Paul Bowles - besides having a wonderful, crazy plot it has the best account I've ever read of travelling across the Sahara by camel.

For "oceans", try Treasure Island by R. L. Stevenson.

For "forests" try Walter Scott's Ivanhoe - King Richard, Ivanhoe and Robin Hood strolling through a forest accompanied by fair damsels, trying to avoid the bad guys, what more can you want? For "mountains" and "lakes" try his Scottish works, e.g., Rob Roy (a tax inspector being thrown into a Loch, in a sack, is my favourite mountain/lake scene.)

[Booker Man]

The sheltering sky must be purchased!

[LitNetIsGreat]

Jerome K Jerome, "Three men in a boat". The author surprised me with some wonderful musings on nature. When said musings are interrupted by farcical scenes, as they usually are, it results in some of the funniest prose I've ever read.

My thoughts exactly, as just reading it currently and it is brilliant! I did read it when I was a teenager but that seems like a different age now and one best forgotten.

Hemingway has already been mentioned and I second that, try Green Hills of Africa as well. After I read Hemingway I walk around like an alpha male for weeks.

If you like fishing, Fish, Fishing and the Meaning of Life is excellent too.

[bluosean]

I'll suggest Coleridge as well. He is one of my favorites. The suggestion of Treasure Island has also been made, but if you are going to go with Stevenson I would go with Kidnapped or some of his short stories, such as the Beach at Falesa or The Merry Men instead, they have the benefit of being set in real places, Scotland, Samoa, and Scotland respectively I think, and are three of his best works. You may try Dana's Two Years Before the Mast too. It is one of my all time favorite books. It is his account of when he leaves New York or Boston Harbor (unfortunately, I don't remember from where exactly, but somewhere in New England) in the hope that the trip will improve his failing eyesight. The ship rounds Cape Horn and his descriptions of the ocean and ice are great. Then up the coast of South America and the California. He gives descriptions of the places he stops, such as Robinson Crusoe Island, and the people he is with. His accounts of the California Coast are great fun to read. Spanish, and no English, was spoken then, and the books is amended with an interesting comparison titled "Twenty-four Years Later" where he visited California again to find it completely changed.

Also, anything by James Cooper. The Leatherstocking Tales are good.

[Summer M]

Steinbeck was quite the nature lover and writer, although he doesn't usually get credit for it.
See
John Steinbeck: Naturalism's Priest
Woodburn O. Ross
College English , Vol. 10, No. 8 (May, 1949), pp. 432-438
http://www.jstor.org/stable/372552

AND

John Steinbeck: Novelist as Scientist
Jackson J. Benson
NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction , Vol. 10, No. 3, Tenth Anniversary Issue: III (Spring, 1977), pp. 248-264
http://www.jstor.org/stable/1345452

[Mugs]

This may sound weird but Robert E Howard's Conan short stories. The guy was a gifted poet, it's a shame that his character Conan has been bastardized into a laughable idiot. Anyway, Howard really loves to paint nature in his writing and does it beautifully. Check out his poem Cimmeria:


I remember
The dark woods, masking slopes of sombre hills;
The grey clouds' leaden everlasting arch;
The dusky streams that flowed without a sound,
And the lone winds that whispered down the passes.

Vista upon vista marching, hills on hills,
Slope beyond slope, each dark with sullen trees,
Our gaunt land lay. So when a man climbed up
A rugged peak and gazed, his shaded eye
Saw but the endless vista--hill on hill,
Slope beyond slope, each hooded like its brothers.

It was gloomy land that seemed to hold
All winds and clouds and dreams that shun the sun,
With bare boughs rattling in the lonesome winds,
And the dark woodlands brooding over all,
Not even lightened by the rare dim sun
Which made squat shadows out of men; they called it
Cimmeria, land of Darkness and deep Night.

It was so long ago and far away
I have forgotten the very name men called me.
The axe and flint-tipped spear are like a dream,
And hunts and wars are like shadows. I recall
Only the stillness of that sombre land;
The clouds that piled forever on the hills,
The dimness of the everlasting woods.
Cimmeria, land of Darkness and the Night.

[stlukesguild]

Wordsworth is aeguably the geeatest nature poet ever.

I was thinking Wordsworth as well... but you might also look into the poetry of John Clare and Frederick Goddard Tuckerman. I would also look into the Japanese and Chinese poets as well as Goethe's Italian Journey.

[JBI]

Japanese poets to me would win hands down.

As for Chinese poets, very few are actually "nature lovers". Nature is just a system of contrived metaphors in Chinese poetry and painting. Some would argue, but let them.

It works like this, the first book of poetry, the Book of Odes basically relied on natural images as forms of constructive metaphors called Xing in Chinese understanding - the peach tree is representative of a relationship, or the pine is symbolic of the lovers' constancy, etc.

These contrivances continued on - the withered shape of the flowers in the painting represents the decay or mistreatment of officials in government, the wild landscape represents the longing for truth in chaos, etc. Wang Wei, regarded in the west as probably the best nature poet of China was a court poet whose works were undeniably politically charged. His natural scenery always highlights his longing for court life, his estate which he is "exiled" to is converted into his "canvas". Yet what lurks behind the poems is the longing for Chang'an, the City - the world of society. The nature of the world is pale in comparison to the society of the court. Nature just got the benefit that the only really free genre of Chinese poetry was exile poetry, where one by convention needed to make use of the natural, wild landscape for poetic effect.

As for Japan it is something very different. Japanese poetry has the benefit of being rooted in a tradition that early on crossed with Buddhism and forged a culture obsessed with subjectivity. Therefore the natural world was given subjective characteristics - the Autumn is felt by the poet, rather than seen, the moon is not an object or conceit, but a subjective experience. Therefore the Japanese have thrived on nature, and to this day, despite the urban chaos of Japan, still probably have a deeper sensitivity to nature than Western, and certainly Chinese people.

As for Western voices - well, the Renaissance, especially the Southern renaissance can be regarded as the dark ages of nature - Michelangelo is the poet/painter of artifice, of construction, rather than nature. He needs an urban background, there is architecture, the subject is cultivated out of its nature into perfection, like the world, like architecture. David is David not because he is natural, but because he is perfected.

Such an attitude seems to have kept going throughout European thought until Romantic times, but even so, the ones to truly perfect the tradition were not English, but I would say American, as the American geography and potential led itself to an idea of natural wonder. In literature this can be seen in Emerson, in Thoreau, in Longfellow, and even in Emily Dickinson to an extent. It also has had a more profound impact culturally than most people give credit, with something like the preservation of so many national parks, and their virtually free entrance tickets as a result (70$ a year per vehicle for the whole country is the best rate I have yet seen in the world). The idea of wilderness as something non-violent is, I would argue, something truly American.

Canadians have done much too, but in terms of literature, the natural world in Canadian writings is usually violent, oppressive, even murderous. Characters freeze to death, or else drown. Perhaps this is a form of realism, but it has had a permanent effect on the culture. That being said, we also enjoy the wilderness, if not write it, and we also come from that great New World tradition of enjoying nature as nature, something the rest of the highly populated world from my experience lacks (Europe has cultivated it, populated it, and built on it, China has destroyed it, fenced it, and commercialized it, Japan is overpopulated so restricted it, etc.).

[JBI]

This may sound weird but Robert E Howard's Conan short stories. The guy was a gifted poet, it's a shame that his character Conan has been bastardized into a laughable idiot. Anyway, Howard really loves to paint nature in his writing and does it beautifully. Check out his poem Cimmeria:

Not particularly great as a poem. Feels repetitive and boring to my ears, but what do I know.

I mean, in terms of nature lover, probably Tolkien, but I would not advocate his writing. There is a difference between loving nature and writing well.


Even so, the big trend now in criticism, in art, and in global affairs seems to be the global environment. It is everywhere I read, ecocritics, histories of nature, nature poetry, a million NGOs, and poems galore. It is like the new War. Everyone wants to write it, to define it.

My quibble though is nobody to me seems to get it right. It's the same way it took politically fused criticism and art years before they matured into something worth reading. Calling Byron a bad poet because he mistreated his pet monkey is just bad poetic criticism, probably the same way criticisms of Childe Harold as a Post-Colonial poem to me seem utter failures and cheapenings.


That being said, one cannot ignore now that the environment and the natural world is probably the biggest subject around - louder than anything, with the potential to be bigger than the Vietnam war was to the States.

[Alexander III]

As has been mentioned before Wordsworth, I mean all the Romantics loved nature, but Wordsworth stands out. Byron projected himself unto nature, Shelley always looks at nature as a poet looking at nature, and Keats's Nature is one of the mind; it is only Wordsworth who loves nature because it is there to be loved. I would suggest reading the Prelude, a pretty fantastic poem.

Another suggestion would be Chateubriande, particularly Renee and Atala, and even his Memoirs - he was much like Wordsworth, except his nature is far more well traveled, he see's the wild of louisiana, the forests of france, the acerbic lands of the ottoman empire; ect - and all his descriptions are rather beautiful.

As Neely mentioned Hemingway's The Green Hills of Africa is a very fine novel, And Steinbeck has a talent for portraying the beauty of the land. Naturally there are Virgil's Georgics which deserve a mention too.

Another two works I wish to name are: Lermontov's A Hero Of Our Time, which is set in the russian caucus region and the novel is filled with poetic views of the savage and beautiful landscape; and if you are in the mood for a work of Italian renaissance genius, Jacopo Sannazaro's Arcadia is defiantly worth a gander .

[hellsapoppin]

William Cullen Bryant & Nathaniel Hawthorne immediately come to mind.