Found some unexpected poetry just now: Talking, of course, about the ivory-billed woodpecker. From a book called American Ornithology, written in 1814.[They] have a dignity in them superior to the common herd of woodpeckers. Trees, shrubbery, orchards, rails, fence posts, and old prostrate logs, are all alike interesting to those, in their humble and indefatigable search for prey; but the royal hunter before us, scorns the humility of such situations, and seeks the most towering trees of the forest; seeming particularly attached to those prodigious cypress swamps whose crowded giant sons stretch their bare and blasted or moss-hung arms midway to the sky.
The Ivory-Billed Woodpecker They have a dignity in them
superior to the common woodpecker --
Trees, shrubbery, orchards, rails, fence posts,
and old prostrate logs,
are all alike interesting to those, in their humble search for prey;
Yup. Poetry. but the royal hunter before us,
scorns the humility of such situations, and seeks
the most towering trees of the forest;
those prodigious cypress swamps
whose crowded giant sons stretch their bare and blasted
or moss-hung arms
midway to the sky.
You can't go ten pages in almost any book written in the 19th century about anything without finding prose that could make spectacular verse. Something's got kaput in our education system if they taught everyone (except most women! and blacks! and poor people!) to write better in 1814 than they do two hundred years later.