Plants and Other Living Things: A Talk by Dr. Theresa Kelley

Eighteenth-century talk about “plant life” took this idea very literally. The poet, experimentalist, and inventor Erasmus Darwin pushed this idea to extremes in a poem he first called “Loves of the Plants,” where highly animated plants speak about love, loss, and queerly unusual partners. Dr. Theresa Kelley, faculty, Department of English at University of Wisconsin – Madison, explains how this account of plants in love may have something to tell us about how poetic ideas offer possibilities back to science.