Birds and Poets
The most widely read naturalist of his era moves between close observation of birds and essays on Whitman and Emerson, at an unhurried pace that still holds.
Burroughs’s 1877 collection, moving between close observation of birds and essays on Whitman, Emerson, and the nature of poetic making. He was the most widely read naturalist of his era, and the prose still carries the unhurried attention that made him so. The pairing in the title is his real argument: that noticing a bird properly and reading a poem properly are the same faculty.
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Maria Popova
In one of the essays found in his exquisite 1877 collection Birds and Poets (public library | public domain), the philosopher-naturalist John Burroughs (April 3, 1837–March 29, 1921) explores the nature of that creative act through a parallel between poetry and personhood anchored in a brilliant metaphor for the two different approaches to creation.
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