poem is not a narrative; instead, reminiscent of the picaresque tradition, it consists of discrete descriptions of eighty-three separate species which are accompanied by extensive explanatory footnotes. In The Loves of the Plants, Darwin claims "to Inlist Imagination under the banner of Science". A believer in Enlightenment ideals, he wanted not only to participate in scientific discovery but also to disseminate its new knowledge in an accessible format. As Darwin scholar Michael Page has written, “Darwin sought to do for Linnaeus . . . what Pope had done for Newton and celestial mechanics in the Essay on Man” Personification In one of the interludes of The Loves of the Plants, the voice of the Poet, which would seem to be Darwin's voice as well, argues that poetry is meant to appeal to the senses, particularly vision. Darwin's primary tool for accomplishing this was personification. Darwin's personifications were often based on the classical allusions embedded with Linnaeus's own naming system. However, they were not meant to conjure up images of gods or heroes; rather, the anthropomorphized images of the plants depict more ordinary images. They also stimulate the readers' imaginations to assist them in learning the material and allow Darwin to argue that the plants he is discussing are animate, living things—just like humans. Darwin's use of personification suggests that plants are more akin to humans than the reader might at first assume; his emphasis on the continuities between mankind and plantkind contributes to the evolutionary theme that runs throughout the poem. The Loves of the Plants argues that human emotion is rooted in physiology rather than Christian theology. Darwin would take his materialism even further in The Economy of Vegetation and The Temple of Nature, works that have been called atheistic. In describing plants through the language of love and sex, Darwin hoped to convey the idea that humans and human sexuality are simply another part of the natural world. Darwin writes that his poem will reverse Ovid who “did, by art poetic, transmute Men, Women, and even Gods and Goddesses, into trees and Flowers; I have undertaken, by similar art, to restore some of them to their original animality” Themes Evolution In his Phytologia (1800), Darwin wrote “from the sexual, or amatorial generation of plants new varieties, or improvements, are frequently obtained”. He insisted in The Loves of the Plants that sexual reproduction was at the heart of evolutionary