Bravo, Eddington7! The Meynell's quote you posted is much to the point. I do much agree with you that poetry can give us insights in nuce of the 'spirit of landscape' or sense of landscape sometimes  better than a long list of tecnical concept-parameters attempting to explain it. In my not humble opinion you cannot digg the sense of landscape if you don't have a "sense of poetry". Next to poets, I would say that landscape photografers get pretty close to the thing; but only those photografers that,like the poets, want to say something to others and not only to themselves. Because the thing,you see, about genius loci is that ordinary folk can be aware of it, sense it, but it take artists to show it, convey, übermitteln, sacarlo a luz, so that others can feel it.

      Take for example Alphonse de Lamartine, a famuos French poet. In true not famuous now, because he is not  a la mode nowadays. Lamartine knew a thing or two about the Sense of Landscape. Most people know (or used to know in my old days) his Le Lac. Formidable! But there is also L'Isolement, of which I found what looks to be a nice translation to English. Here's just a small piece of it:

Souvent sur la montagne, á l'ombre du vieux chêne,
Au coucher du soleil, tristement je m'assieds;
Je promène au hasard mes regards sur la plaine,
Dont le tableau changeant se déroule à mes pieds

   On the mountain, in the old oak's domain,
Often at dusk I sadly take my seat,
And glance haphazardly across the plain
Whose varied scene unfolds beneath my feet.

Here growls the river with its frothy surge:
It winds far off, and vanishes from view;
There the calm lake extends its sleeping verge
Where evening's star arises in the blue.

On these dark woods crowning the mountains' height
Twilight is sending out its final ray,
While the blurred chariot of the queen of night
Rises, and pales the skyline far away.