Poems About Trees

An international array of writers, from Homer and Virgil to Wordsworth, Whitman, and Thoreau, from Su Tung P’o and Basho to Czeslaw Milosz and Seamus Heaney, has celebrated sacred groves, wild woodlands, and bountiful orchards—and the results include some of our most beloved poems. For thousands of years humans have variously worshipped trees, made use of them, admired them, and destroyed them—and poets have long chronicled the relationship.

In this collection, Robert Frost’s “Birches…