Beach, Joseph Warren, The Concept of Nature in Nineteenth-Century English Poetry, New York: Macmillan, 1936.

One of the few extended studies of the meanings of nature in poetry. The volume covers Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Goethe, Carlyle, Emerson, Whitman, Arnold, Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, Meredith, Hardy, Jeffers, and Eliot. The book is an invaluable source for reading about representations of nature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Darwin, Charles, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life, New York: Modern Library, 1974. A crucial text, containing one of the modern world's most indispensable concepts: natural selection. Darwin here helps readers to understand the workings of the natural world.

Ellmann, Richard and Robert O'Clair, The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, New York: W. W. Norton, 1988. From the verse of Walt Whitman to Cathy Song, this anthology features the...