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The all-pervasive nature of the plant world is in contraposition to the actuality of plant blindness, the latter referring to a lack of attention to the existence and importance of the botanical world arising, perhaps, out of a view of the plant world as merely a background for animal life (Hall 5). This is especially seen in the context of literature and literary criticism, for the myriad relationships between literature and botany appear to have been little explored even within the field of science and literature. This lacuna is all the more glaring in light of current ecological concerns and the increasing need for what may be called the non-plant world to have a better understanding of, and interaction with, the plant world. There have been, however, several attempts to bring developments in botany to bear upon readings of literary texts. Some of these have been restricted to literary analyses of botanical tracts (the 2011 issue of the Journal of Literature and Science [JLS 4.1] was a special issue on “Women and Botany”) or the use of botanical metaphors in the literature of a particular period (Bloom: The Botanical Vernacular in the English Language is an attempt along these lines). Studies such as The Poet as Botanist by Molly Mahood offer detailed analyses of the methods and strategies used by poets of the past who were interested in botany and who used botanical research as raw material for their poetry. Among the analyses that Mahood’s book carries is an elaborate one of the poems in Erasmus Darwin’s “The Loves of the Plants” and the obvious Linnaean overtones in them. The present article is an attempt along similar lines. It is based on the understanding that plants are not the passive, sessile creatures that exist in much of popular and scientific imagination. Based on this assumption, it theorizes a kind of poetry that uses plants neither as metaphors and similes, nor as personifications of human traits, but acknowledges them instead as thinking, active and intelligent creatures. The article connects such a picture of plants emerging from certain poems to recent developments in the field of plant neurobiology and a renewal of interest in the research of scientists such as Jagadis Chandra Bose and Charles Darwin’s botanical studies, which reinforce the same idea.

“It happens quietly”: Plant Poetry and the Botanification of the Imagination