Cryptogamia

Abstract

Although the Romantic exuberance for plants has often struck later poets and critics as a naïve, even embarrassing, enthusiasm, recent ecocriticism has correctly recognized this Romantic fascination with plants as an event – the emergence of something new within literature, and the emergence of a new function for literature. This essay, though, takes a different approach to this event, arguing that at stake in the Romantic love of plants was something more than simply an eco‐friendly reverence of trees, flowers, and shrubs. The Romantic relationship to plants was in fact not really one of “respect,” with its implications of propriety and distance, but rather a vertiginous falling for the strange and dark life of vegetation. Eighteenth and early nineteenth‐century botanists and chemists were aware, in ways that earlier researchers had not been, that plants live and grow quite differently from animals. It was this difference that solicited Romantic desire and attention, and I describe as cryptogamia the mutual twining of the plant around the human and the embrace of the plant by the human – a joint seduction that produced what P.B. Shelley described as a “mutual atmosphere” between species.