Prophets of Nature: Green Spirituality in Romantic Poetry and Painting

Many millennia before the present Scriptures existed, God wrote his first book, namely, nature itself. It was through this 'original Bible' that men and women of ancient times experienced the mind and will of God. It then seemed as if the eighteenth century intellectual Enlightenment closed that book forever. However, in the following century, the Romantic poets and painters rediscovered the spirit enshrined in the natural world. This perceptive study, by well-known thinker and writer Gordon Strachan, discusses the tradition of green spirituality as seen through poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge, and painters such as Samuel Palmer, Caspar David Friedrich and William Turner. Strachan argues for the genuine spiritual vision of these artists before the so-called twilight of Romanticism set in. He shows that there are many deep springs of inspiration in their work which chime with our current environmental concerns.