When Erasmus Darwin announces that “the general design” of The Loves of the Plants “is to inlist Imagination under the banner of Science” (ii), an echo of the Song of Solomon (itself a touchstone for eroticized botanical imagery) reveals how charged the relationship is: “his banner over me was love” (2:4). This essay argues that taking The Loves of the Plants seriously as an erotic work reveals the essential importance of desire to the evolving diversity of vibrant life it envisions and to the interdisciplinarity it achieves. Not only does the poem popularize the Linnaean sexual system of taxonomy by infusing it with sensibility, creating a landscape driven by desire. The form of the poem makes a mixed marriage of art and science, verse and footnotes, in a tantalizingly episodic (non-)structure which could be called pornographic. The relationships between the male and female parts of an overwhelming variety of flora are much more varied than the conventional gender roles later critics have often ascribed to the poem. Yet, while each vignette offers another sexual permutation, the cumulative effect blurs variety into sameness, an effect earlier recognized by John Cleland in Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. Cleland extends the boredom to style, citing the flatness, in inevitable repetition, of the vocabulary of pleasure. The descent of Darwin's poetry into unfashionability under Wordsworthian aesthetics is also the demise of an erotic interdisciplinarity. In addition to the stylistic simultaneity of variety and sameness, Darwin's footnotes, epic similes and tangents are driven from topic to topic by a kind of unchaste curiosity which flattens borders demarcating species, subject headings, legitimate attractions. “The Loves”, both desire and the poem itself, “laugh at all, but Nature's laws” (IV:486). Even Nature's laws play loose with categories, as pollinating insects are seduced by flowers. This article examines how The Loves of the Plants envisions a continuum of life forms and of disciplines by portraying and performing cross-species erotic interaction. Personification of vegetable reproduction invites readers to conceive of their own desire in botanic terms (as, indeed, readers and parodists did). Fascination with hybridization epitomizes both Darwin's poetry and his science, from the remarkable love affair between nightingale and rose which produces the bird-flower offspring fantastically described in Loves, to the painstaking study of cross-breeding in the evolutionarily crucial chapter “Of Generation” in Zoonomia.

中文翻译：

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艳丽的色情：伊拉斯姆斯·达尔文（Erasmus Darwin）的《植物的爱》中的形式与欲望

当伊拉斯mus斯·达尔文（Erasmus Darwin）宣布《植物之爱》的“总体设计”是在科学的旗帜下“激发想像力”（ii）时，所罗门之歌的回声（本身就是色情植物意象的试金石）揭示了其充满活力关系是：“他在我身上的旗帜是爱”（2：4）。本文认为，将《植物之爱》作为色情作品认真对待，这表明欲望对于它所设想的充满活力的生活的不断变化的多样性及其实现的跨学科性至关重要。这首诗不仅通过将感性灌输给林奈分类学性体系而广为流传，创造了由欲望驱动的风景。这首诗的形式将艺术与科学，经文和脚注混合在一起，构成了一种诱人的（非色情的）情节式（非色情）结构。绝大多数植物区系的男性和女性之间的关系比后来的评论家经常将这首诗归因于传统的性别角色要大得多。然而，尽管每个小插图都提供了另​​一个性排列方式，但累积的效果却使品种变得相同，这是约翰·克莱兰德早在《快乐女人的回忆录》中所认识到的。克莱兰德以无聊的重复为例，将愉悦的词汇表述为平坦，从而将无聊感扩展到了风格上。在华兹华斯主义美学的影响下，达尔文诗歌的不流行性下降，也是色情跨学科性的终结。除了多样化和相同性的风格同时性之外，达尔文的脚注还包括：史诗般的明喻和切线是由一种好奇的好奇心驱使的，这种好奇心使物种，主题，合法景点的边界变平。欲望和诗歌本身的“爱”都“笑了，但自然法则”（IV：486）。甚至自然法则在类别上也很松散，因为授粉昆虫被花朵所吸引。本文探讨了《植物之恋》如何通过描绘和进行跨物种的色情互动来设想一种生命形式和学科的连续体。蔬菜复制的人格化邀请读者以植物学的方式来构想自己的欲望（确实，如读者和模仿者所做的那样）。对杂交的迷恋体现了达尔文的诗歌和他的科学，