The Intelligence of Flowers - Softcover

Maeterlinck, Maurice

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0791472744 ISBN 13: 9780791472743

Publisher: State University of New York Press, 2007

Synopsis

A new translation of one of Maeterlinck’s four great nature essays.

The second of Maeterlinck’s four celebrated nature essays―along with those on the life of the bee, ant, and termite―“The Intelligence of Flowers” (1907) represents his impassioned attempt to popularize scientific knowledge for an international audience. Writing with characteristic eloquence, Maeterlinck asserts that flowers possess the power of thought without knowledge, a capacity that constitutes a form of intelligence. Appearing one hundred years after the first publication, Philip Mosley’s new translation of the original French essay, and the related essay “Scents,” maintains the verve of Maeterlinck’s prose and renders it accessible to the present-day reader. This is a book for those who are excited by creative encounters between literature and science as well as current debates on the relationship of humankind to the natural world.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

"The republication of Maurice Maeterlinck's `The Intelligence of Flowers,' regrettably forgotten in our time, is long overdue. The introduction by Mosley is itself a gem, and contains one of the best overviews in print of writings about intelligence in Nature." -- Stephen Harrod Buhner, author of The Secret Teachings of Plants: The Intelligence of the Heart in the Direct Perception of Nature
The second of Maeterlinck's four celebrated nature essays--along with those on the life of the bee, ant, and termite--"The Intelligence of Flowers" (1907) represents his impassioned attempt to popularize scientific knowledge for an international audience. Writing with characteristic eloquence, Maeterlinck asserts that flowers possess the power of thought without knowledge, a capacity that constitutes a form of intelligence. Appearing one hundred years after the first publication, Philip Mosley's new translation of the original French essay, and the related essay "Scents," maintains the verve of Maeterlinck's prose and renders it accessible to the present-day reader. This is a book for those who are excited by creative encounters between literature and science as well as current debates on the relationship of humankind to the natural world.

It would be superfluous to redraw the picture of the great systems of floral fertilization: the play of stamens and pistil, the seductiveness of scents, the appeal of harmonious and striking colors, the development of nectar, totally useless to the flower, and which it manufactures only to attract and hold the foreign liberator, the messenger of love, bee, bumblebee, fly, butterfly, moth, which must bring it the kiss of the distant, invisible, motionless lover...

We could truly say that ideas come to flowers in the same way they come to us. Flowers grope in the same darkness, encounter the same obstacles and the same ill will, in the same unknown. They know the same laws, same disappointments, same slow and difficult triumphs. It seems they have our patience, our perseverance, our self-love; the same finely tuned and diversified intelligence, almost the same hopes and the same ideals. Like ourselves, they struggle against a vast indifferent force that ends by helping them. -- from "The Intelligence of Flowers"

The Belgian author Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949) is remembered best as a pioneer of Symbolist drama in the 1890s. Recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1911, Maeterlinck was also a prolific and accomplished essayist.

About the Author:

The Belgian author Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949) is remembered best as a pioneer of Symbolist drama in the 1890s. Recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1911, Maeterlinck was also a prolific and accomplished essayist.

Philip Mosley is Professor of English, Communications, and Comparative Literature at Penn State University.

About this edition

• Publisher: State University of New York Press
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0791472744
• ISBN 13: 9780791472743
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 110