The Poet as Botanist
Cambridge University Press
Edition: Reissue, 2/28/2011
EAN 9780521188722, ISBN10: 0521188725
Paperback, 282 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 1.8 cm
Language: English
For centuries, poets have been ensnared - as one of their number, Andrew Marvell put it - by the beauty of flowers. Then, from the middle of the eighteenth century onward, that enjoyment was enriched by a surge of popular interest in botany. Besides exploring the relationship between poetic and scientific responses to the green world within the context of humanity's changing concepts of its own place in the ecosphere, Molly Mahood considers the part that flowering plants played in the daily lives and therefore in the literary work of a number of writers who could all be called poet-botanists: Erasmus Darwin, George Crabbe, John Clare, John Ruskin and D. H. Lawrence. A concluding chapter looks closely at the meanings, old or new, that plants retained or obtained in the violent twentieth century.
Introduction
1. Primroses at Dove Cottage and Down House
2. Erasmus Darwin's feeling for the organism
3. Crabbe's Slimy Mallows and Suffocated Clover
4. John Clare
bard of the wild flowers
5. Ruskin's flowers of evil
6. D. H. Lawrence, botanist
7. Poetry and photosynthesis.
Review of the hardback: 'Mahood's grasp of the history of botany and botany as a whole is admirable; few professional botanists, working as they do in ever more specialised fields, could match her overview of their subject. ... Mahood leads, almost forces, us to look at both botany and poetry with fresh eyes, and notice details which we have failed to examine or study for many years.' Roy Vickery, John Clare Society Journal