M. M. Mahood. The Poet as Botanist. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Hardback ISBN-13: 9780521862363. Price: $93.00; Paperback ISBN-13: 9780521188722. Price: $36.99

M. M. Mahood’s The Poet as Botanist ends with two indexes: the first, an index of persons; the second, a more surprising index of plants. The inclusion of the double index sheds light on the unique nature of Mahood’s study. In an important sense, the book is about poets and the ways in which their lives and writings were vitally shaped by their engagement with the plant world. In an equally important sense, the book is a paean to plants themselves in all their beauty and splendor. And this is as it should be. An Emeritus Professor of English literature, Mahood went on to pursue her lifelong interest in plant life by completing an Open University degree course in biology. Every page of her work communicates her deep knowledge of both the literary and botanical fields. Meticulous readings of poems are interwoven with equally meticulous descriptions of the plants they invoke. Indeed the qualities found in the writers she studies – the sense of limitless wonder, joy, and empathy in relation to the plant world, all of which are bound with a careful attention to detail and structure – are the qualities most evident in Mahood’s work. One can well imagine Mahood’s ideal reader leafing through the index of plants to find a favorite flower or fern and then delighting in tracing its representation to the literary sphere. The joy – both intellectual and emotional – produced by the concourse of the natural and the cultural is the chief impulse that animates this study. The historical focus of The Poet as Botanist is on the Golden Age of botany, a period that opens with the rise of Linnaean taxonomy and the subsequent popularization of plant studies in the eighteenth century and closes with the gradual eclipse of amateur botany by the more forbidding and abstract science of molecular biology in the years following the First World War. At the heart of the book are chapters on Erasmus Darwin, George Crabbe, John Clare, John Ruskin, and D. H. Lawrence, all writers who grew up in this age of botanical fervor and who can also be considered botanists in their own right. This last distinction is crucial. Mahood sets aside writers often thought of as lyricists of the floral scene, such as Coleridge, Hardy, and Hopkins, in order to shed light on the intimate kinship between scientific and poetic ways of seeing nature in those thinkers who moved freely between disciplines we too often regard as mutually exclusive. To this end, Mahood structures her chapters as biographia botanica (3). The payoff of Mahood’s methodological gambit is the new picture of each writer that comes into focus. In each instance, we learn how the writer’s deep knowledge of the plant world informed his poetic vision as well as the ways his particular poetic sensibility shaped the direction and form of his scientific work. And, perhaps most crucially, we discover how these intellectual concerns folded into even the most private aspects of these writers’ lives. John Clare, the self-described “bard of wild flowers” provides a good illustration of the advantage of this biographical method. The son of a farm laborer, Clare draws from his local Northamptonshire dialect as well as from the works of renowned natural historians and blends the villager’s associative, common-sense way of looking at plants from his youth with the precision of the botanist. The mixture of the exact and the evocative captures the aesthetic delight and intellectual joy that characterizes Clare’s encounter with the natural world. The result is a cornucopia of plants in his verse. Mahood counts over 370 …