ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses The Botanic Gardens textual spaces have left two yawning gaps: the actual subject matter of the two poems themselves. Combining these two very different works, The Botanic Garden was one of the great hits of the 1790s and the source of Erasmus Darwin poetic reputation, as well as considerable wealth. Darwin's hymn to the discordant wonders of Kew contrasts markedly with Anna Seward's soothing account of his own Lichfield gardens antipathy to discorded tones. The hyperactivity of Darwin's alterations is not necessarily to the disadvantage of Seward. Darwin promises to use it to invert Ovid. In inviting people to walk in to the enchanted garden thus produced, Darwin sets up an oscillation between the real external world and the white sheet onto which it is projected. In its dance between abstractable meaning and an undercutting materiality, Darwin's curiously intense focus on the poetics of paper has a postmodern feel.
