ABSTRACT
Jones's theory was clearly proto-Romantic and indeed people know from their tributes that Coleridge, Robert Southey, and Shelley were greatly influenced by him. Jones transformed the reception of Oriental poetry. The East featured as pretty flowers, sensuous bowers and priapic pagodas rather than as distinct societies and cultures with their own traditions and their own landscapes. Southey's verse pictured Oriental gardens, temples and pagodas not just as ornamental exotic landscapes, as in Collins or early Jones, but as real places in which occurred religious rites that featured sex and sacrifice. Linnaeus classified plants on the sexual system, grouping them into species and genera on the basis of the number of stamens and pistils they possessed. It was Linnaeus himself who had first spiced his botanical narratives with humorous references to human promiscuity, in which stamens corresponded to penises, pistils to vaginas, the male and female plants to amorous men and women.
