Gardens Fragmented

Abstract

abstract:The topos of the English cottage garden had become, by the end of the eighteenth century, a British ideal, its horticultural verbiage entwined in certain "traditional" georgic poems, though not those written by laborer poets. Garden fragments advanced an audience's proclivity to read georgics not merely as authentic, but unified, whereas their structure is founded on digression. The illusion of coherence is paradoxically maintained through juxtaposition and fragmentation, strategies reliant on readerly impulse to interpret georgic in terms of integration rather than assemblage; verse coheres because of grammatical tactics rather than internal logical strategy.