This study explores the relationship between the poetic language of Donne, Herbert, Milton and other British poets of the seventeenth century, and the choral music and part-songs of composers including Tallis, Byrd, Gibbons, Weelkes, and Tomkins. McColley combines close readings of particular poems and musical compositions with engagement in historical controversy about the significance of the arts, their relation to politics, and the reliability of language.

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, primarily John Milton, Andrew Marvell, and Henry Vaughan, but also Margaret Cavendish, Thomas Traherne, Anne Finch, and others, responded to experimental proto-science and new technology in ways that we now call 'ecological' - concerned with watersheds and habitats and the lives of all creatures. It provides close readings of works by these poets in the contexts of natural history, philosophy, and theology as well as technology and land use, showing how they responded to what are currently considered ecological issues: deforestation, mining, air pollution, drainage of wetlands, destruction of habitats, the sentience and intelligence of animals, overbuilding, global commerce, the politics of land use, and relations between social justice and justice towards the other-than-human world. In this important book, Diane McColley demonstrates the language of poetry, the language of responsible science, and the language of moral and political philosophy all to be necessary parts of public discourse.

This study explores the relationship between the poetic language of Donne, Herbert, Milton and other British poets, and the choral music and part-songs of composers including Tallis, Byrd, Gibbons, Weelkes and Tomkins. The seventeenth century was the time in English literary history when music was most consciously linked to words, and when the mingling of Renaissance and 'new' philosophy opened new discovery routes for the interpretation of art. McColley offers close readings of poems and the musical settings of analogous texts, and discusses the philosophy, performance, and disputed political and ecclesiastical implications of polyphony. She also enters into the discourse about the nature of language, relating poets' use of language and composers' use of music to larger questions concerning the arts, politics and theology.