‘An Unrolled but Glorious Fragment’: Spirituality, Imagination, and the Legibility of Nature

Traditions relating to the book of nature have long held that nature can be approached as something legible, as a text with spiritual meaning. Modern epistemological, cultural, and philosophical shifts called much of that approach into question. But, in this essay, I argue that Romanticism, especially as exemplified in figures such as Novalis, Wordsworth, and especially Coleridge, provides a powerful response to such disenchantment and points the way towards a non-reactionary, non-anachronistic retrieval of the legibility of nature.