The treatment of nature in English poetry between Pope and Wordsworth

Myra Reynolds's The treatment of nature in English poetry between Pope and Wordsworth is a discerning study of a crucial transitional period in English literary history, tracing how poetic representations of the natural world evolved from Augustan decorum toward Romantic inwardness and immediacy. With careful attention to major and lesser-known poets alike, Reynolds examines shifts in taste, sensibility, landscape description, and the philosophical valuation of nature. The book's style is analytical, lucid, and historically grounded, situating poetic texts within the broader eighteenth-century movement from artifice, order, and wit toward emotion, sublime experience, and contemplative intimacy with the natural world. Reynolds, an accomplished literary scholar of English poetry, writes with the authority of a critic deeply versed in both eighteenth-century culture and Romantic beginnings. Her interest in this interval between Pope and Wordsworth reflects a scholarly recognition that literary periods do not change abruptly, but through subtle continuities and reorientations. That conviction clearly informs the book's method and purpose. This volume is especially recommended for readers interested in the genealogy of Romanticism, the history of poetic sensibility, and the development of nature as a central literary category. It remains a valuable and intelligent guide to a formative chapter in English poetry.