ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the relationship between the green airs and the poetic ones often given the same name. Early modern ideas about respiration, including its sensory associations with the olfactory system and its literary associations with inspiration, in the chapter are segregated from the other corporeal and mental processes that contributed to the total experience of reading green in early modern England. The chapter takes up the notion of green as something susceptible to respiration, not only by the likes of nymphs and sylvan spirits but by mere mortals too. It thus explores of how early modern concerns raised by various forms of air pollution interacted with the traditional conception of lyric verses as 'airs', invisible but still palpable materials that were sometimes inspired, in both senses of the word, and that moved with remarkable ease in and out of the textual atmosphere as they were written, read, recited, sung, and even remembered.
