The treatment of nature in English poetry between Pope and Wordsworth

This study follows the shifting view of the natural world in English poetry from the late seventeenth century through the early nineteenth, tracing how poets moved from the formal, decorative treatment of nature to an emerging, more personal engagement. By placing verses beside contemporary paintings, garden designs, travel narratives, and even early novels, the author shows how the same changing attitudes echoed across the arts. The early chapters outline the classical conventions that still dominated the eighteenth century while hinting at the first stirrings of a new, more intimate sensibility.

The work then follows those subtle hints as they blossom into fuller expressions, highlighting the ways poets began to let landscapes speak to inner experience. It also examines the broader cultural backdrop—social tastes, aesthetic theories, and advances in scientific thought—that helped shape this transition. Readers will come away with a clearer sense of how the seeds of the Romantic vision were already taking root well before Wordsworth and his peers fully articulated them.