The interest in natural philosophy that propelled the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries overturned most of the traditional ideas of man's place in the world and in the universe. When this happened, the accessibility of scientific knowledge began to diminish: among other ideas, the perception that plants and flowers were created by God for the pleasure and moral education of mankind. By the eighteenth century, the study of botany and the systematic observation of plants and their structures had become popularized enough to change the way in which lay observers viewed them. Poetry, however, had to wait for the confluence of a poet's careful examination and the recognition of some personal connection, argues M. M. Mahood, who calls this coming together “biophilia,” or “life recognising itself” (153). In The Poet as Botanist, she gracefully illuminates the evolving relationship between the plant kingdom and poetry from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth by examining the botanical interests of Erasmus Darwin, George Crabbe, John Clare, John Ruskin, and D. H. Lawrence.

Molly M. Mahood, Emerita Professor of English Literature at the University of Kent, Canterbury, is an established Shakespeare scholar whose works include Poetry and Humanism (1950), Shakespeare's Wordplay (1957), and Bit Parts in Shakespeare's Plays (1992). Mahood also edited The Merchant of Venice (2003) as part of the New Cambridge Shakespeare series. After her retirement from teaching, she became a student again, earning a degree in biology. The Poet as Botanist is the point at which Mahood's areas of expertise meet—very skillfully—as she explains the effects of botanical observation and affinity upon poetry during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries.

Erasmus Darwin is probably better known, nowadays, as the grandfather of Charles Darwin than as the Enlightenment polymath that he was in his own day. Erasmus Darwin was a physician, an inventor, a philosopher, and a poet, and he was largely responsible for the translation of Carolus Linnaeus's botanical classification system into English. His poem, The Loves of the Plants, published in 1789, was written to introduce nonscientists to the joys of botany by anthropomorphizing plants so that, following Linnaeus but eliminating references to sexual intercourse, they became male and female, and their reproductive processes were described as romantic tales of courtship. According to Mahood, modern readers find the poem perplexing, since it is necessary to unravel and reverse Darwin's metamorphosis of plant into human. Mahood points out, however, that Darwin was probably well aware of the absurdities of such a transformation of flora into a sort of lesser fauna. While Erasmus Darwin did not always reach the most accurate conclusion in his botanical studies, describing, for instance, the brain of a flower, he was more botanist than poet, though his works on plants include another long poem, The Economy of Vegetation (published together with The Loves of the Plants as The Botanic Garden in 1791), as well as Phytologia (1800) and The Temple of Nature (1806–7), a poem on his theories of evolution.

Occupying a central role in the latter half of the nineteenth century, John Ruskin's interest in botany had a great deal to do with his early religious fundamentalism and a great deal to do with art. Among his criticisms of various old masters like Claude Lorrain and Joshua Reynolds was that their representations of plants and flowers were not anatomically correct as divinely created and so were morally wrong. Ruskin rejected any implication that a plant's processes were mechanical; in his view, plants and flowers were designed instead for no other purpose than to impart lessons about beauty and virtue to mankind. Even after he suffered a crisis in faith, he found social and political meaning in the growth of plants. For example, Mahood explains, his description of a tree's growth in “Of Leaf Beauty” in part 6 (1860) of Modern Painters includes mention that no two leaves are exactly alike, just as individuals in society are unequal. Altogether, Mahood claims, Ruskin had a long-lived and unfortunate influence upon the way his contemporaries viewed nature, and his work on flowers, Proserpina (1879), was “a wreck” (148).

Mahood concludes The Poet as Botanist with a thoughtful explanation of the way in which nature poetry was discredited during the twentieth century, with botany deposed by molecular biology and pastoral verse replaced by Modernist literature, which, she points out, required an urban setting for its momentum. In addition, she argues that the carnage of the First World War was incompatible with poems about nature, though perhaps she overlooks such war poetry as “In Flanders Field” by John McRae (1915) or “Break of Day in the Trenches” written in 1916 by Isaac Rosenberg. The twentieth century was just too violent and too much about material progress to allow for any poetic appreciation of the timelessness of seasonal cycles marked by growth and harvest. By the late twentieth century, however, botany was back in another guise—that of plant ecology, a field which has grown out of the recognition that the relationship between humans and the natural world is not limited to the biophilia engendered in a poet by a primrose but is one of mutual dependence for survival.