The poetry of the earth is never dead
Source: On the Grasshopper and Cricket (1816)
Topic
Earth in this collection is the ground that holds everything else. Archimedes on needing only a place to stand in order to move the earth is the most audacious entry: the lever that moves the world requires only a fixed point of contact. Emerson on earth-laughing-in-flowers is the Transcendentalist perception: the natural world expresses what the human world labors to articulate. Keats on the-poetry-of-the-earth-never-dying is the permanence argument: whatever else ends, the capacity of the natural world to produce experience worth noticing is continuous. Shaw on the richest man in an ugly world buying only ugliness connects the earth's condition to its inhabitants' — we cannot purchase better than what we have collectively produced. Schweitzer on man-ending-by-destroying-the-earth is the most urgent entry in the collection: the capacity that makes us extraordinary may also be the capacity that makes us final. Verne on the sea covering seven-tenths of the globe gives earth its oceanic majority: the planet is mostly water, and its descriptions as "earth" are already a kind of anthropocentric narrowing.
The poetry of the earth is never dead