Features of plant images in the didactic poetry of Jacques Delille

The article raises the question of the position of the plant image in the poetry of late classicism, namely in the didactic poem of Abbot Jacques Delille "The Gardens" (1782). It is concluded that against the backdrop of the developing pictorial style in the literature of symbolism and early romanticism, Delille remains within the limits of the norms and canons adopted in classicism. In the description of gardens and parks in Europe, he adheres to an objective position and does not go to the level of a new emotional (subjective) vision of the phenomena of nature peculiar to his contemporaries like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Bernard de Saint-Pierre. Against the backdrop of how the approach to the description of nature and its phenomena in the allure of French sentimentality varied (Rousseau, de Saint-Pierre, Genlis), the late 18th-century classicists (Delille, Parny, Chenier, Dorat, Balard) use cliche metaphors, sparingly, tacitly denote the presence of a tree or a shrub in the landscape, workpiece metaphors like medieval sample drawings complicate the evaluation of the individual fantasy of the author. At the end of the 18th century late classicism developed the genre of didactic poetry, in which an exact but skimpy and typified enumeration of the details of nature and landscape argues with the nascent foundations of the painting style and the subjective author's perception of the phenomena of nature in sentimentalism and pre-romanticism. Nevertheless, the plant world created by Delille in "The Gardens" has become a kind of model for the description of plants in many works of authors of a later period, especially in realism. Gardens, flower gardens, flower shops, which are described in detail in many works of George Sand, Alphonse Karr, Gustave Flaubert, Emile Zola, the description of the process of cultivating tulips in the novel Black Tulip (1850) by Alexandre Dumas (father), camellias in the famous work of Alexandre Dumas (son), the variety of plants in the "floral carnival" of Provence, the details of the garden in the suburbs of Paris in Guy de Maupassant's "Rose" (1885), "Old Mongilet" ("Le Pere Mongilet", 1885), Alphonse Daudet's "House for Sale" ("Maison a vendre", 1880) are a continuation, certainly more detailed and colorful, of the tradition of describing the phenomena of floriculture, the sale of plants, the description of the traditions of horticultural life, i.e. not the creation of a subjective, intertextual floral image, but the transfer of a specific historical fact associated with the cultivation of plants, flowers, bouquets, the fashion of "language of flowers", "flower mail", "flowers-attributes" in hands or on clothes of women - all this is an artistic illustration for the historical events of the 19th century, the invaluable evidence of the nuances of fashion, everyday life, secular and religious conventions.

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