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One of the few poems I have committed to memory is Wendell Berry's "The Peace of Wild Things" which begins "When despair for the world grows in me/and I wake in the night at the least sound/in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be/I go and lie down where the wood drake/rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds." It is written with the grace and comfort of the 23rd Psalm, except that the restorative tonic is time spent in nature, rather than a petition to God. I've always been partial to pantheism, seeing God, or what I experience as the sacred impulse of a creative world (or the creative impulse of the sacred world) made manifest in the beauty of the natural world. 
English poet John Clare (1793-1864) is perhaps the earliest poet who set this plumb line to Berry. Born in Helpston (now Helpstone) in the northeast of England, where the land was "enclosed" during Clare's lifetime, Clare was a working-class poet who spent his life in hard labor and in going mad. His propensity for intellectual activity, that is, book learning, started early in occasional opportunities to attend school, but even the village elders thought 'that way could lead to madness' and for the son of a farm laborer to aspire to anything beyond a hard-scrabble existence and constricted social world, perhaps that way did result in his later struggles with mental illness.
Clare has been terribly overlooked in our canon of great poets, overtaken by the Romantic poets William Blake, Percy Shelley, William Wordsworth, and John Keats. Compared to them, Clare's poems are much more direct, relaxed (though not neglectful of form), and colloquial. But because of these very attributes, he is much more accessible now, especially to American poets who have a tradition of relishing dialect and the plain-spoken.
The main thing I love about Clare is his ability to identify with the animals (and even the plants) of his surrounding Northamptonshire countryside. As a boy and young man, he could roam relatively freely. The enclosure movement began in the late 18th-century and privatized formerly public lands in order to raise profits on agricultural products (let's face it, it was a land grab by the rich); it meant that many of the woods and fields that Clare once had access to became off-limits. Clare's powers of description of nature rival Steinbeck's. Here's a short poem:
To the Fox Fern
Haunter of woods, lone wilds and solitudes
Where none but feet of birds and things as wild
Doth print a foot track near, where summer's light
Buried in boughs forgets its glare and round thy crimped leaves
Feints in a quiet dimness fit for musings
And melancholy moods, with here and there
A golden thread of sunshine stealing through
The evening shadowy leaves that seem to creep
Like leisure in the shade.
With poem titles like "The Wren," "In Hilly Wood," "Swordy Well," "The Sand Martin," "Birds' Nests," and "The Eternity of Nature," it's hardly necessary to speculate about what inspired Clare's muse. His poems are filled with the crunch of leaves underfoot, the twittering of birds (long before we were punished by the twittering of online 'friends'), and the smells of woody dells and brackish fens. Researching Clare, I came across his blog: the British John Clare Society has posted many of his writings, and an appeal for funds to restore his thatched-roof home in Helpston. There is also a North American John Clare Society.
John Clare is a poet for springtime and one to read especially as we come up to Earth Day on April 22. 
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