This is the first book to address William Wordsworth’s profound identification of the spirit of nature in trees. It looks at what trees meant to him, and how he represented them in his poetry and prose: the symbolic charm of blasted trees, a hawthorn at the heart of Irish folk belief, great oaks that embodied naval strength, yews that tell us about both longevity and the brevity of human life. Linking poetry and literary history with ecology, Versed in Living Nature explores intricate patterns of personal and local connections that enabled trees – as living things, cultural topics, horticultural objects and even commodities – to be imagined, theorized, discussed and exchanged. In this book, the literary past becomes the urgent present.

This book considers William Wordsworth's use of iconography in his long poem The Excursion. Through the iconographical approach, the author steers a middle course between The Excursion's two very different interpretive traditions, one focusing upon the poem's philosophical abstraction, the other upon its touristic realism. Fresh readings are also offered of Wordsworth's other major works, including The Prelude. Yen explores Wordsworth's iconography in The Excursion by tracing allusions and correspondences in an abundance of post-1789 and earlier verbal and pictorial sources, as well as in Wordsworth's prose and poetry. He analyses how the iconographical images in The Excursion contribute to, and impose limitations on, the overarching preoccupations of Wordsworth's writings, particularly the themes of paradise lost and paradise regained in the post-revolutionary context. Shedding light on a vital aspect of Wordsworth's poetic method, this study reveals the visual etymologies - together with the nuances and rhetorical capacities - of five categories of apparently 'collateral' images: envisioning, rooting, dwelling, flowing, and reflecting.