Clare's Poetic Binomials

Abstract

John Clare's confessed preference for the ‘vulgar’ names of flowers and his apparent dismissal of the sexual system as ‘darkness visible’ seems to keeps the taint of Linnaean influence at a distance. His enumeration of flowers in ‘The Wild Flower Nosgay’, however, looks very much like two eighteenth-century descriptive procedures: poetic diction and binomial nomenclature. Dryden's popular translation of Virgil's Georgics modified a classical inheritance of compound epithets into phrases later recognised as poetic diction. This inheritance finds an unexpected consonance in the binomial nomenclature of Linnaeus, who loved the Georgics and referred to them in his work. By comparing poetic diction and binomial nomenclature, this essay investigates the resources of compression or visibility which either procedure might offer to a bookish and keen-sighted poet like Clare. In doing so, it reiterates the case for Clare's immersion in eighteenth-century poetic procedure.