ABSTRACT
Erasmus Darwin amorous plants had poetic precedents in the post-Augustan Roman poet Claudian and in two English neo-Latin poems: Abraham Cowley's Plantarum and Demetrius de la Croix's Connubia Florum. The floral harems do not form an imaginary but a real system, which philosophy has discovered, and with which poetry sports. This chapter discusses the Feminist arguments that it corroborates Linnaeus's phallocentrism land some weighty hits but do not fully account for its subversive playfulness or strong focus on female agency. A range of responses was available to those unhappy about the ramifications of Linnaeus's dependence on sexual metaphor. In the terms established by Foucault and Bernal, this late self-revision by Darwin graphically illustrates how his grandsons time-driven world starts to replace the Linnaean tabula of eternal differences. The chapter discusses the hidden intricacies, Loves Otaheitian climax sets the seal on the vein of eroticism running through the poem.
