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Hopkins’s Poetry

Like Kilmer, Gerard Manley Hopkins was a poet whose verse was motivated as much by his Christian faith as by his fascination with the natural world. Unlike Kilmer, Hopkins pushed against the conventions of form and invented a sparkling new language to express his devotion. A comparison of “Trees” with poems like “God’s Grandeur,” “The Windhover,” and “Pied Beauty” proves enormously illuminating.

Mary Oliver, “Wild Geese”

Oliver’s famous poem from later in the twentieth century shares with Kilmer’s a devotion to the splendor of the natural world. Although the vision Oliver presents in “Wild Geese” is ultimately secular rather than sacred, it offers an important point of comparison for “Trees”—not least because both poems have enjoyed enormous popularity.

William Wordsworth’s Poetry

It’s worthwhile to link Kilmer to Wordsworth, who is an important predecessor in the lineage of nature poetry. Wordsworth’s reflections on the natural world are less sentimental and earnest, but Kilmer’s work nonetheless owes a debt to him and other British Romantic poets.

Walt Whitman’s Poetry

Whitman represents another key forebear for Kilmer. Although his poetry is much wilder and more experimental than a poem like “Trees,” Whitman’s concern with nature and how to situate the self in relationship to it draws the two poets’ work together.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden

As someone whom we now associate with the American Transcendentalist movement, Thoreau is an important figure to consider in relationship to Kilmer. His extended account of the year he spent near Walden Pond makes him a kindred spirit to the speaker of “Trees.”

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