I’ve been reading John Muir’s account of his 1879 trip to Alaska, which he wrote based on his journals and notes from that trip and then published in 1915. As the small ship on which he sailed was passing among the islands of the Alexander Archipelago, Muir said this about the islands and the surrounding scenery:
“Viewed one by one, they seem detached beauties, like extracts from a poem, while, from the completeness of their lines and the way that their trees are arranged, each seems a finished stanza in itself.”
— John Muir, Travels in Alaska
So there you have it: the ultimate expression of the found poem. Muir spends several more pages describing what those stanzas, those “blessed evergreen islands,” sum up to, much as one analyzes a typewritten poem. He can say this in the same breath he describes the shape of the islands and their glaciated formation in technical terms. He describes their varying forms as being due to the “unequal glacial denudation” to which the various substrates were subject. Proof again that science, sensitivity, and poetry coexist.