Description:This book describes the emergence of ecological understanding among the English Romantic poets, arguing that this new holistic paradigm offered a conceptual and ideological basis for American environmentalism. James C. McKusick reveals the ways in which writers such as Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Blake contributed to the fundamental ideas and core values of the modern environmental movement, and traces their vital influence to the work of Emerson, Thoreau, and Muir.