ABSTRACT
The garden with all its biblical, classical and ecclesiastical associations is a central image of the sites, processes and products of poetry, and a picture of how material realities are sculpted and cultivated by poetics to produce fruitful and meaningful space. As a logical extension of the nature imagery, Donne also uses the organic metaphor to describe the process of writing poetry. Edward Taylor comments on this connection: The use of Nature and Art as pivotal terms in treatises and poetry on gardens closely parallels their use in the criticism of poetry. Woodward has so effectively transplanted his soul and disafforested his mind that the little of earth' that remains in his finished work is a garden of sweets, not a wilderness of weeds and thorns. Donne transplants the green metaphor from religious growth narrative to the story of poetic influence, conflating into one the three gardens of fruit, faith and verse.
