New Delhi, Feb. 9 -- In his 1929 essay, Wordsworth in the Tropics, English writer Aldous Huxley ridiculed 19th-century British romantic poet William Wordsworth and his followers for waxing eloquent about the uplifting potential of nature. Huxley argued that in the temperate weather of Europe, experiencing nature might inspire delicate poetry, but that is hardly how people in other parts of the world encounter it. "Nature, under a vertical sun, and nourished by the equatorial rains, is not at all like that chaste, mild deity who presides over. the prettiness, the cozy sublimities of the Lake District," he wrote. "A few weeks in Malay or Borneo would have undeceived him (Wordsworth)."

Though literary scholars have since challenged Huxley's...