| Author |
Mahood, M. M. |
| Year |
2008 |
| Publisher |
Cambridge: CUP |
| Number of pages |
304 |
| ISBN |
9780521862363 |
| Keywords |
|
Abstract
Amazon (2013):
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.
