Title: The gardens of Emily Dickinson
First published: 2004
Description: This volume is a study of American poet Emily Dickinson's (1830-1886) devotion to flowers and gardening. The author casts light on Dickinson's temperament, her aesthetic sensibility, and her vision of the relationship between art and nature, revealing that the successful gardener's intimate understanding of horticulture helped shape the poet's choice of metaphors for every experience: love and hate, wickedness and virtue, death and immortality. Over a third of Dickinson's poems and nearly half of her letters allude with passionate intensity to her favorite wildflowers, to traditional blooms like the daisy or gentian, and to the exotic gardenias and jasmines of her conservatory. Each flower was assigned specific connotations by the nineteenth century floral dictionaries she knew; thus, Dickinson's association of various flowers with friends, family, and lovers, like the tropes and scenarios presented in her poems, establishes her participation in the literary and painterly culture of her day.

"In this first substantial study of Emily Dickinson's devotion to flowers and gardening, Judith Farr seeks to join both poet and gardener in one creative personality. She casts new light on Dickinson's temperament, her aesthetic sensibility, and her vision of the relationship between art and nature, revealing that the successful gardener's intimate understanding of horticulture helped shape the poet's choice of metaphors for every experience: love and hate, wickedness and virtue, death and immortality." "The Garden of Emily Dickinson will provide pleasure and insight to a wide audience of scholars, admirers of Dickinson's poetry, and garden lovers everywhere."--Jacket.
Subjects: Gardening, Knowledge, Botany, Botany in literature, Gardens in literature, Flowers in literature, Plantes dans la littérature, Literaire thema's, Bloemen, Et la botanique, Jardinage, Tuinen, Garten, Et le jardinage, Fleurs dans la littérature, Jardins dans la littérature, Dickinson, emily, 1830-1886, Gardening, united states, Poetry (poetic works by one author), Knowledge and learning
Places: Massachusetts, Amherst
People: Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
LC classification: PS1541.Z5 F265 2004