<i>The Science and Poetry of Animation: Personification, Analogy, and Erasmus Darwin's Loves of the Plants</i>

Packham, Catherine

doi:10.3366/rom.2004.10.2.191

Cited by 15 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…For this reason, Darwin's animate plants are distinct from the personifications of abstract concepts common in eighteenth-century verse: as Catherine Packham notes, his poem is engaged in ''extending qualities of life, emotion and consciousness to natural objects,'' thus returning animation to the dead specimen. 45 The prefatory ''Proem'' to Loves of the Plants plays on this concept: taking his cue from Ovid's transmutation of men and Gods into flowers and trees, Darwin claims he will ''restore some of them to their original animality'' by the ''poetic art'' of personification. This project of aesthetic and poetic reanimation fits within Darwin's unmistakably vitalist understanding of nature.…”

Section: Life In Deathmentioning

confidence: 99%

Specimen Poetics

Porter¹

2017

Representations

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This essay argues that the modern literary anthology—and specifically its aspiration to delimit both aesthetic merit and historical representativeness—emerged as a response to changes in eighteenth-century botanical collecting, description, and illustration. A dramatic upsurge in botanical metaphors for poetic collections around 1800 was triggered by shifts in the geographies, aims, and representational practices of botany in the previous century. Yoking Linnaean taxonomy and Buffonian vitalism to Hogarth’s line of beauty, late eighteenth-century botanical illustrations imbued plucked, pressed specimens with a new vitality. Erasmus Darwin’s Botanic Garden (1789, 1791) translated the aesthetic reanimations of visual art into a collection of poetic specimens, spurring compilations that promote a vitalist standard of literary value. By rejecting aesthetic reanimation as the figurative ground for poetic collecting, Charlotte Smith and Robert Southey forward an alternative historical model of literary merit, one grounded in the succession and continuity of representative literary types. These competing metrics for selection and valuation underwrite the anthology as we know it today.

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Section: Life In Deathmentioning

confidence: 99%

Specimen Poetics

Porter¹

2017

Representations

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“…Kelley goes further and argues, at least in The Botanic Garden , “Darwin's attitude toward analogy is amazingly carefree, or to put it more frankly, careless, about what an analogy might carry along”, so much so that it “undermines the stasis of Linnaean categories” Loves attempts to represent (81). On poetry and analogy in Loves , see also Porter and Packham.…”

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confidence: 99%

Flowery Porn: Form and Desire in Erasmus Darwin's The Loves of the Plants

Connolly

2016

Literature Compass

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When Erasmus Darwin announces that “the general design” of The Loves of the Plants “is to inlist Imagination under the banner of Science” (ii), an echo of the Song of Solomon (itself a touchstone for eroticized botanical imagery) reveals how charged the relationship is: “his banner over me was love” (2:4). This essay argues that taking The Loves of the Plants seriously as an erotic work reveals the essential importance of desire to the evolving diversity of vibrant life it envisions and to the interdisciplinarity it achieves. Not only does the poem popularize the Linnaean sexual system of taxonomy by infusing it with sensibility, creating a landscape driven by desire. The form of the poem makes a mixed marriage of art and science, verse and footnotes, in a tantalizingly episodic (non‐)structure which could be called pornographic. The relationships between the male and female parts of an overwhelming variety of flora are much more varied than the conventional gender roles later critics have often ascribed to the poem. Yet, while each vignette offers another sexual permutation, the cumulative effect blurs variety into sameness, an effect earlier recognized by John Cleland in Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. Cleland extends the boredom to style, citing the flatness, in inevitable repetition, of the vocabulary of pleasure. The descent of Darwin's poetry into unfashionability under Wordsworthian aesthetics is also the demise of an erotic interdisciplinarity. In addition to the stylistic simultaneity of variety and sameness, Darwin's footnotes, epic similes and tangents are driven from topic to topic by a kind of unchaste curiosity which flattens borders demarcating species, subject headings, legitimate attractions. “The Loves”, both desire and the poem itself, “laugh at all, but Nature's laws” (IV:486). Even Nature's laws play loose with categories, as pollinating insects are seduced by flowers. This article examines how The Loves of the Plants envisions a continuum of life forms and of disciplines by portraying and performing cross‐species erotic interaction. Personification of vegetable reproduction invites readers to conceive of their own desire in botanic terms (as, indeed, readers and parodists did). Fascination with hybridization epitomizes both Darwin's poetry and his science, from the remarkable love affair between nightingale and rose which produces the bird‐flower offspring fantastically described in Loves, to the painstaking study of cross‐breeding in the evolutionarily crucial chapter “Of Generation” in Zoonomia.

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“…According as it did with the materialist theory of simple percepts, which combine by laws of association into more and more complex ideas, it likewise skirted the philosophical worry about analogy that increasingly haunted the age. As Wasserman (1953) and others (e.g., most recently, and both on Erasmus Darwin's complex and conflicted theory and use of analogy, Packham 2004 andPorter 2007) have argued, analogy was a common philosophical stopgap for the moral and theological unmooring that empirical metaphysics, and especially the doctrine of associationism, threatened to occasion. Coleridge Coleridge (1958Coleridge ( [1817, 1:83) characterized associations as "blind" and "habitual," but they are minimally constructive and purposive in that they seek similitude or, in Hartley's (1971Hartley's ( [1749, 1:293) definition of analogy, the "Resemblance, and in some Cases Sameness, of the Parts, Properties, Functions, Uses, &c. any or all, of A to B."…”

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Shelley's Theory of Mind: From Radical Empiricism to Cognitive Romanticism

Bruhn¹

2009

Poetics Today

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This essay reconstructs Percy Shelley's theory of mind from his letters and many unfinished essays as well as his Defence of Poetry (1821), emphasizing his radical insistence on the formal and teleological roles of analogy in human cognition, communication, and culture. Adopting the assumptions, method, and terminology he inherited from the vigorous associationist tradition in eighteenth-century British philosophy and psychology, Shelley sought to demonstrate the innate and thus indefeasible foundations of human morality, especially its master principle of social equity. His analysis took him at once to the heart of a range of psychosocial issues that are today studied under the cognitive scientific rubric of "theory of mind," including the developmental interrelations of, and motivations for, social imitation, language acquisition, and mental representation. Taking first a historical and then a theoretical view, I argue that Shelley's elegant solution to one of the major philosophical problems of the empirical age remains surprisingly relevant to central issues in contemporary science of mind. Associationist Moral Psychology as Theory of Mind: Recovering Shelley's Analogy Though he was there only a term and a half, Percy Shelley (1792-1822) received at Oxford an intellectual stimulus to which he responded for the remainder of his precocious and sadly arrested career. The stimulant was

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The Science and Poetry of Animation: Personification, Analogy, and Erasmus Darwin's Loves of the Plants

Cited by 15 publications

References 2 publications

Specimen Poetics

Specimen Poetics

Flowery Porn: Form and Desire in Erasmus Darwin's The Loves of the Plants

Shelley's Theory of Mind: From Radical Empiricism to Cognitive Romanticism

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