ʻA sort of Philosophical Back Gardenʼ: Keats’s useful and officinal plants

The relationship between Keats and the green realm is more complex than it appears at first sight. His references to plants are more than occasional pieces of botanical poetry, denotatively conveying his highly specialized expertise in plant taxonomy and the officinal use of herbs, nor can they be always interpreted as symptoms of Keats’s allegiance to the conventions of Romantic organicism. On the contrary, they are part of a macrotextual semiotic strategy extending for the whole arch of the poetic production of this author and informing the more profound, structural levels of his poems. Moreover, the phenomenon structurally transposes Keats’s ecological and ethical perspectives on the man-nature relationship, on poetry as a life-sustaining agent, on the poet’s responsibility in coping with human suffering to preserve life and health.