Knowing plants, knowing form: probing the poetics of phyto-centric life

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn this paper the authors trace and challenge the legacy of Erasmus Darwin’s conviction that ‘[s]cience is best delivered in prose, as its mode of reasoning is from stricter analogies than metaphors and similes’. Arguing that poetry is an undervalued mode of making knowledge, the authors highlight forays in poetry that address plants as autopoietic organisms with agency, a feature of plants that is marginalised in the Western scientific tradition. Pointing to couplet rhyming as a form of thinking in the eighteenth century, and looking at the form of John Clare’s ‘Evening Primrose’ (1820) as well as Alice Oswald’s ‘Woman in a Mustard Field’ (1996), the authors bring to the fore poetics of botanical knowledge that are centred on particular formal techniques, on sensual experience and on implicit knowledge of plant life: an implicit knowledge which they suggest hinges on experience rather than empirical data. In so doing, they describe how poetic form, such as the dynamic thinking process that couplet rhyming endorses, can address the problem of an anthropocentric cause-and-effect logic that may fall short of capturing the qualities of organic life generally and of plants in particular.