The Poet as Botanist [Paperback]

This book examines plants and botany in the writing of D. H. Lawrence and John Clare, among others.Exploring the work of writers including D. H. Lawrence, John Clare, George Crabbe and Ted Hughes, Molly Mahood considers the responses of poets to botany in its Georgian and Victorian heyday, and to the ecology that has largely replaced it.Exploring the work of writers including D. H. Lawrence, John Clare, George Crabbe and Ted Hughes, Molly Mahood considers the responses of poets to botany in its Georgian and Victorian heyday, and to the ecology that has largely replaced it.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. This meticulous, graceful study of poet-botanists focuses on five British writers whose scientific interest in flowers informed their literary works: Erasmus Darwin, George Crabbe, John Clare, John Ruskin, and D.H. Lawrence...Summing up: Recommended.
-L. Simon, Skidmore College, Choice