JOHN

See also:

• BURROUGHS, GEORGE (c. 1650-1692)
• JOHN BURROUGHS (1837– )

BURROUGHS (1837– )  , American poet and writer on natural history, was born in Roxbury, Delaware county, New York, on the 3rd of April 1837 . In his earlier years he engaged in various pursuits, teaching, journalism,• farming and fruit-raising, and for nine years was a clerk in the treasury department at Washington . After publishing in 1867 a volume of Notes on Walt Whitman as poet and person (a subject to which he returned in 1896 with his Whitman: a Study), he began in 1871, with Wake-Robin, a series of books on birds, flowers and rural scenes which has made him the successor of Thoreau as a popular essayist en the plants and animals environing human life . His later writings showed a more philosophic mood and a greater disposition towards literary or meditative allusion than their predecessors, but the general theme and method remained the same . His chief books, in addition to Wake-Robin, are Birds and Poets (1877), Locusts and Wild Honey (1879), Signs and Seasons (1886), and Ways of Nature (1905); these are in prose, but he wrote much also in verse, a volume of poems, Bird and Bough, being published in 1906 . Winter Sunshine (1875) and Fresh Fields (1884) are sketches of travel in England and France . A biographical sketch of Burroughs is prefixed to his Year in the Fields (new ed., 1901) . A complete uniform edition of his works was issued in 1895, &c . (Riverside edition, Cambridge, Mass.) .