Auden, was a huge fan of Eiseley's.Īuden wrote an essay about him in The New Yorker and contributed a preface to Eiseley's book The Star Thrower. I returned to him a few years back, after reading that one of my favorite poets, W.H. How did you first come across Eiseley? He wouldn't have been a writer I would necessarily have associated with your work.ĭuring my childhood in the 1970s, my interest in nature led me to read some of Eiseley's essays. The old, stiff, sky-reaching wooden world changed into something that glowed here and there with strange colors, put out queer, unheard of fruits and little intricately carved seed cases, and, most important of all, produced concentrated foods in a way that the land had never seen before, or dreamed of back in the fish-eating, leaf-crunching days of the dinosaurs.' Michael Lind, the author most recently of What Lincoln Believed, discusses Eiseley's essay, which was originally collected in the 1957 book The Immense Journey. 'If our whole lives had not been spent in the midst of it, it would astound us. 'The fantastic seeds skipping and hopping and flying about the woods and valleys brought with them an amazing adaptability,' Eiseley writes.

Unlike the static, towering green vegetation of the dinosaurs' world, this new plant life managed to encase its genetic imprint in suddenly mobile casings called angiosperm (or 'encased seeds').īorne on the wind or attached to animal hides, the new plant life blanketed the world, and mutated its way into countless new settings. At the heart of the explosion was a new kind of flora. In his essay 'How Flowers Changed the World,' the American naturalist Loren Eiseley describes what he calls 'a soundless, violent explosion' of seed-born plant life millions of years ago, just as the Age of Reptiles started to draw toward its own apparently violent close in the late Cretaceous Era. This summer, NPR.org talks with authors about their favorite buttonhole books in the weekly series 'You Must Read This.' All readers have them - and so do writers. Call them buttonhole books, the ones you urge passionately on friends, colleagues and passersby.

Loren eiseley poems