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Lunar Lecture – The Poetics of Romantic Ecology: Erasmus Darwin and Percy Bysshe Shelley by Dr Amanda Blake Davis
27th November 2023 @ 7:30 pm - 8:30 pm
£6.00
In a well-known botanical poem, The Sensitive-Plant, the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley draws upon the eroticised, emotive plants of Erasmus Darwin’s Loves of the Plants, where Darwin’s ‘chaste mimosa’ gives rise to Shelley’s loveless ‘sensitive-plant’. In the lesser known ‘Unfinished Drama’, a mysterious ‘magic plant’ grows, snake-like, muddling the categories of plant and animal. Centring on these two poems, this talk will explore Shelley’s ecological poetics through his interrelationship with Darwin.
