“But Poets Have Never Been Botanists”: The Literary Herbarium in Charlotte Smith’s Poetry

ABSTRACT Displaying the plant specimens in their physical environments without subjugating them to any fixed spatial or temporal conditions, Charlotte Smith creates a literary herbarium that encompasses the identifiable qualities of the plants included in her poetry and that foregrounds the continually transformed and transforming material habitats and relationships of the nonhuman and human worlds. Smith offers a figuration of botanical knowledge that neither relies on the destruction of that which she represents nor on removing the plants from their environments into an herbarium with often very little connection to its environment. Materially and poetically reconfiguring the natural world according to the herbarium’s principles of atomicity and entanglement, Smith poetry’s power lies in expanding the herbarium. In her literary herbarium, agency is not only found in the human world; instead, the nonhuman world proves to be just as agential as the human one. Here, botany does not merely serve as a steppingstone to the domination and exploitation of the natural world. Smith’s poetry offers a glimpse of the possibility of botany as a non-hierarchical and non-exploitative study of the world.