Along with poets, philosophers, and deep ecologists, nature writers—who may be something of all three—address the world alienation of Western civilization. By example as well as with words, they teach us to turn from the self to the world, from ego to ecos.In these deeply felt meditative essays, Sherman Paul contemplates the cosmological homecoming of nature writers who show us how to reenter the world, participate in it, and recover respect for it.

In For Love of the World Sherman Paul considers Thoreau, John Muir, and Aldo Leopold, major writers in the American tradition of nature writing; Henry Beston and Loren Eiseley, writers not yet so canonical; and Richard Nelson and Barry Lopez, our estimable contemporaries.

Paul's meditative mode follows the practice of naturalists who enter the field, come into the open, and relate their immediate experiences. In the most primary and direct way, his essays belong to our moment in history when nothing is more essential than our reattachment to earthly existence. They will reawaken our love of the world—the necessary eros of ecos—and our wonder at and gratitude for being.

Hewing to Experience charts Sherman Paul's course of coming to know William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Gary Snyder and the critical scholarship devoted to them as it provides an assessment of recent criticism. The initial section, on criticism and poetry, sets out many of the insistences that give this valuable collection of essays and reviews its coherence. Considered are criticism, poetics, poetry and old age, ethnopoetics, the gift exchange of imagination, and the recent and controversial enterprise of canon formation.

The final section of Hewing to Experience provides an important, meditative rereading of the work of Barry Lopez that convincingly places ecological writing within the large revisionist project of avant-garde poetry. Of particular note, too, is the full commentary on the Olson-Creeley correspondence.

Throughout, Paul's humane enthusiasm is evident. Hewing to Experience merits the readership of all those who are interested in contemporary poetry and concerned with the ongoing criticism of major poets and with critical practice.

Randolph Bourne - American Writers 60 was first published in 1966. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.