Eleanor Wilner: The Compass Rose (January 1995)

Despite the Romantic impulse to see nature as free from cultural influence, Eleanor Wilner shows how those “pure” symbols of the natural world are in fact laden with historically constructed meaning. Exploring how one such symbol, the rose, has acquired different connotations over time, serving as a centering device for the human imagination in its location of cultural meaning, she follows it from Dante’s Divine Comedy to its descent in the contemporary A Gilded Lapse of Time by Gjertrud Schnackenberg.