Poetry and Ecology in the Age of Milton and Marvell

The focus of this study is the perception of nature in the language of poetry and the languages of natural philosophy, technology, theology, and global exploration, primarily in seventeenth-century England. Its premise is that language and the perception of nature vitally affect each other and that seventeenth-century poets-including John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Henry Vaughan, Margaret Cavendish, and Anne Finch among others-responded to experimental proto-science and new technology in ways that we now call "ecological".