Early in 1905, Leo Tolstoy wrote to a close friend in England: “Yesterday and today I have been reading Edward Carpenter’s book, Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure, and am enraptured by it.... Please inform me of what you know about Carpenter himself. I consider him a worthy successor to Carlyle and Ruskin.” The query as to Carpenter’s identity may well be repeated a hundred years later; his striking originality, which at one time inspired poets and anarchists alike, has since been virtually forgotten. As a young man, Carpenter (1844-1929) abruptly abandoned a planned vocation in the clergy after readingWhitman’s Leaves of Grass a volumewhich, in its celebration of pastoral pantheism and robust sensuality, enthralled generations (until the twentieth centurymilitary-industrial nightmare rendered it a seeming anachronism). In Whitman, Carpenter had found a champion of the body, a liberator of sensation and feeling. They became friends when Carpenter made a visit to the U.S. in 1877 (during which he also became acquainted with Ralph Waldo Emerson–who had once facetiously remarked to Thoreau that Leaves of Grass was “a mixture of the Bhagavad-Gita and the New York Herald.”) Returning to England, Carpenter soon settled on a few acres in Millthorpe, a Derbyshire hamlet near Chesterfield, where he lived modestly for the next forty years–a pioneer in the practice of the “voluntary simplicity” he so admired in Thoreau’s Walden. Over the years, he would travel intermittently into London to lecture and to offer his pastoral-aesthetic (or “green”?) brand of anarchism to the lively discussions spearheaded by such figures as William Morris and the expatriate Prince Pyotr Kropotkin. Like the poet Oscar Wilde–who once characterized philistines as knowing “the price of everything and the value of nothing”–Carpenter deplored commercial regimentation and the stunting of aesthetic-spiritual qualities. LikeThoreau–and unlike Marx–Carpenter emphasized a transformation of sensibility which would prefigure the restructuring of society. In particular, the intimate contact with the aesthetic delights of the natural world would overcome alienation and lead to renewed spiritual evolution–a pantheistic “cosmic consciousness” which is the true religiosity. Today, “living” as we do in the entirely dehumanized megamachine, it is almost impossible to recapture the lyrical, pastoral-humanism and pantheistic sensibility of such pre-1914 poets as Carpenter, whose Towards Democracy (1883) embraced the Whitmanesque celebration of human self-realization in harmony with nature. Carpenter’s sensibility also greatly influenced the young D.H. Lawrence,