Tongues in Trees Studies in Literature and Ecology

The wholesale destruction of trees is a sign of the careless and short-sighted greed that is despoiling our world. Kim Taplin believes that reverence for nature is vital to healthy spirituality and imagination, and that since the industrial revolution we witness an increasing disquiet among our English writers. In a series of connected essays, generously prefaced by poems and prose extracts, she considers how Keats, Clare, Barnes, Ruskin, Hopkins, Jefferies, Hardy, Edward Thomas, E. M. Forster, Ivor Gurney, David Jones, Andrew Young, J. R. R. Tolkien and Frances Horovitz have celebrated the Greenwood and responded to its erosion. This eloquent and timely study of trees and woods in the English literary imagination will inspire all those who are concerned about our environment as well as all readers and students of literature.