ABSTRACT
Joseph Trapp's seminal article 'The Owl's Ivy and the Poet's Bays. An Enquiry into Poetic Garlands', published in the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes of 1958, represents the first port of call for anyone wishing to learn about the connection between vegetal symbolism and the recognition of poetic excellence, from antiquity to Alexander Pope. Orange trees and fruits were unknown to the Graeco-Roman world and could therefore not occur in ancient poetic symbolism. This must have been the main reason why Trapp excluded them from his survey. The enduring faith and confidence in Latin as a living poetic language, which continued unabated during the first three decades of the sixteenth century, was primarily inspired by Giovanni Pontano. The very symbol Pontano had devised for his revisited Adonis myth, the orange tree, became for many the proudly acknowledged blazon of Neo-Latin poetry, in respectful but positive contrast with the bay tree of ancient verse.
