For those who believe that the literature of ecology begins with Al Gore, Wendell Berry, or the explorer John Muir, this book will be eye-opening. Poetry and Ecology in the Age of Milton and Marvell discusses dozens of writers in seventeenth-century England whose works display far-reaching and subtle attention to nature and the environment. Diane McColley's introduction sets forth her agenda: “The language of [these] poems promotes perception of nature and a sense of connection within it and argues implicitly for the value of literary studies in an increasingly technological world” (7). McColley, whose previous scholarship in this field includes a book (A Gust for Paradise: Milton's Eden and the Visual Arts [Urbana, IL, 1993]) and several essays (such as “Milton and Nature: Greener Readings,” Huntington Library Quarterly 62 [2001]: 423–44), is well aware of the dangers inherent in this enterprise. Her introduction concerns itself with one: the tendency of writers to appropriate natural beings and phenomena via language. McColley counters this danger in several ways: first, by confronting the problem, through her elegant discussion of June Sturrock's poem “Like Sparrows”; second, by enlisting philosophers of consciousness, particularly Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in the struggle; and, third, by using scientists such as Stephen Jay Gould to suggest that creative art and scientific knowledge reveal nonconflicting truths about nature and that these truths are unique and valuable contributions of our species.

A paradigm case for the book, Andrew Marvell's country-house poem, “Upon Appleton House,” is the subject of McColley's first chapter. McColley argues that, through Marvell's witty poetics, nature and perception are shown to inform and revitalize each other. An apt juxtaposing of Abraham Cowley's straightforward Royalist poem, “The Grasshopper,” with Marvell's giant-appearing grasshopper on a blade of grain about to be mowed down, shows that fluidity of perspective is his distinguishing characteristic. In light of that aesthetic, Marvell's conclusion, which celebrates Nunappleton as “Paradise's only map,” is no mere conventional compliment. Rather, McColley's reading enables us to see this perfectly situated way of living and perceiving amid nature as the closest post–Civil War England could come to rebuilding Eden in its green and pleasant land.

Chapters 2 and 3 form a pair in focusing upon Earth and Air, Water and Woods. The poets celebrating these natural elements include John Milton, who depicts the devil Mammon as the inventor of mining in Paradise Lost; John Lilburne, who decried the draining of “wastes” in Epworth; and John Evelyn, whose Fumifugiam warns of air pollution in London and whose Sylva shows how endangered British forests already were in 1664, as Ken Hiltner has argued in Milton and Ecology (Cambridge, 2003). At this point in McColley's argument, the opposing forces to the poets of ecology appear. United by their commitment to the Baconian project of controlling Nature for scientific or economic gain, these writers include Sir Walter Ralegh, who personifies Guiana as a virgin to be raped and plundered, and Walter Blith, who promises farmers twenty- to fourtyfold profit by felling timber and maximizing planting in The English Improver. As distasteful as McColley finds such writers, one must concede that their message supports the “winning” side in the debate, and that such inducements to development continue apace today. McColley would, I suspect, take that as an urgent reason to listen to the early ecologists.

Chapters 4 and 5 also form a pair, this time treating Hylozoic and Zoic poetry. The former, from the Greek υλη for matter or wood, concerns itself with seventeenth-century poetic explorations of matter, in both its philosophical and substantial senses. On the philosophy of matter, the century saw a debate between materialist monists (such as Milton) who affirmed matter and dualists as well as atomists (such as René Descartes and Thomas Hobbes) who denigrated it. More down to earth, the aptly named Nehemiah Grew extolled the growth of actual trees and plants in The Anatomy of Vegetables (1670), as does Anne Finch's “The Tree,” which calls for a natural death—as opposed to a criminal felling—of a noble tree. Marvell's metaphysical poem, “The Garden,” occupies a middle ground between the philosophical and the concrete approaches to English plants. McColley's ark of animals gives pride of place to the tortoise, celebrated of course for its shell, read as a “shield of virtue” in English emblem books, as a boat in case of need by Du Bartas in his Divine Weeks, and as the packaging for a tasty meat by Thomas Hariot in his account of Ralegh's Roanoke expedition. As had Finch for the dying tree, Margaret Cavendish sympathetically puts us in the endangered coney's perspective in her poem “The Hunting of the Hare.” Godfrey Goodman's lovely book, The Creatures Praysing God (1622), offers a universally based call for animal rights: “Then let us conceive that all the workes of God make one corporation, and are as members of one body, under one common government.” Apparently that call went unanswered. In her final chapter, dealing with Milton's prophetic epics, McColley finds again the pair of ethics at odds throughout her study: the ethic of domination and predation, embodied by Nimrod and Mammon in Paradise Lost, versus the ecological ethic Milton also holds out, of preserving the Earth as a paradise, or a renewed paradise, after the Fall.

The contents and message of Poetry and Ecology in the Age of Milton and Marvell are valuable. Regrettably, certain aspects of the book's form and presentation weaken its appeal. The text retains several typos, including errors in the literature, such as calling Conscience in “Upon Appleton House” “that heaven-nursFd plant” (23). In the same vein, there is an offhand quality to several of the footnotes. For example, one tells us that paintings showing Adam and Eve tending the garden before the Fall may be found in McColley's earlier book; one wishes those apt illustrations were here as well, particularly given the book's relatively high price. These quibbles, however, are slight. McColley's book revitalizes our perceptions of nature and ecology in the seventeenth century.