Specimen Poetics: Botany, Reanimation, and the Romantic Collection

Specimen Poetics: Botany, Reanimation, and the Romantic Collection. Porter, D. Representations, 2017.
abstract bibtex

This essay argues that the modern literary anthology—and speciﬁcally its aspiration todelimit both aesthetic merit and historical representativeness—emerged as a response to changes ineighteenth-century botanical collecting, description, and illustration. A dramatic upsurge in botanicalmetaphors for poetic collections around 1800 was triggered by shifts in the geographies, aims, andrepresentational practices of botany in the previous century. Yoking Linnaean taxonomy and Buffonian vitalism to Hogarth’s line of beauty, late eighteenth-century botanical illustrations imbued plucked,pressed specimens with a new vitality. Erasmus Darwin’s Botanic Garden (1789, 1791) translated theaesthetic reanimations of visual art into a collection of poetic specimens, spurring compilations that promote a vitalist standard of literary value. By rejecting aesthetic reanimation as the ﬁgurative groundfor poetic collecting, Charlotte Smith and Robert Southey forward an alternative historical model of literary merit, one grounded in the succession and continuity of representative literary types. Thesecompeting metrics for selection and valuation underwrite the anthology as we know it today.

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 year = {2017},
 pages = {60-94},
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 abstract = {This essay argues that the modern literary anthology—and speciﬁcally its aspiration todelimit both aesthetic merit and historical representativeness—emerged as a response to changes ineighteenth-century botanical collecting, description, and illustration. A dramatic upsurge in botanicalmetaphors for poetic collections around 1800 was triggered by shifts in the geographies, aims, andrepresentational practices of botany in the previous century. Yoking Linnaean taxonomy and Buffonian vitalism to Hogarth’s line of beauty, late eighteenth-century botanical illustrations imbued plucked,pressed specimens with a new vitality. Erasmus Darwin’s
 Botanic Garden 
 (1789, 1791) translated theaesthetic reanimations of visual art into a collection of poetic specimens, spurring compilations that promote a vitalist standard of literary value. By rejecting aesthetic reanimation as the ﬁgurative groundfor poetic collecting, Charlotte Smith and Robert Southey forward an alternative historical model of literary merit, one grounded in the succession and continuity of representative literary types. Thesecompeting metrics for selection and valuation underwrite the anthology as we know it today.},
 bibtype = {article},
 author = {Porter, Dahlia},
 journal = {Representations},
 number = {139}
}

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