Fleurs du Travail, Fleurs Sublimes: Anna Mendelssohn's Involute Tulips

Aligning Anna Mendelssohn with the nineteenth-century, feminised genre of floral poetry, this essay traces Mendelssohn’s demarcations tulips from 1974 to 1995. Through a series close readings tropes, identifies early preoccupations that contribute her great poem, “Silk and Wild Tulips”, first published in For Mendelssohn, flowers stand for an inarticulable, idealised form communication, thinking is consistent nineteenth-century forebears. its focus on flowers, unearths both thoroughness editorial processes, some innately conservative strands thinking. A wide variety unpublished archival materials are referenced, among them, prison diaries, photocopied pamphlet, poem manuscripts, marginalia, typescript prose.