National Science Library of Georgia

The poet as botanist /

Mahood, M. M.

The poet as botanist / M.M. Mahood. - Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2008. - 1 online resource (xi, 269 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 05 Oct 2015).

Primroses at Dove Cottage and Down House -- Erasmus Darwin's feeling for the organism -- Crabbe's slimy mallows and suffocated clover -- John Clare : bard of the wild flowers -- Ruskin's flowers of evil -- D.H. Lawrence, botanist -- Poetry and photosynthesis. Introduction --

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.

9780511485435 (ebook)


Darwin, Erasmus, 1731-1802 --Knowledge--Botany.
Crabbe, George, 1754-1832 --Knowledge--Botany.
Clare, John, 1793-1864 --Knowledge--Botany.
Ruskin, John, 1819-1900 --Knowledge--Botany.
Lawrence, D. H. 1885-1930 --Knowledge--Botany.


English poetry--History and criticism.
Botany in literature.
Nature in literature.
Perception in literature.
Philosophy of nature in literature.

PR508.N3 / M35 2008

821.009/364
Copyright © 2023 Sciencelib.ge All rights reserved.