The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin ─ Enlightened Spaces, Romantic Times

While historians of science have focused significant attention on Erasmus Darwina€?s scientific ideas and milieu, relatively little attention has been paid to Darwin as a literary writer. In The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin: Enlightened Spaces, Romantic Times, Martin Priestman situates Darwina€?s three major poems - The Loves of the Plants (1789), The Economy of Vegetation (1791) and The Temple of Nature (1803) - and Darwin himself within a large, polymathic late-Enlightenment network of other scientists, writers, thinkers and social movers and shakers. Interpreting Darwina€?s poetry in terms of Darwina€?s broader sense of the poetic text as a material space, he posits a significant shift from the Enlightenmenta€?s emphases on conceptual spaces to the Romantic perioda€?s emphases on historical time. He shows how Darwina€?s poetry illuminates his stance toward all the major physical sciences and his well-formulated theories of evolution and materially based psychology. Priestmana€?s study also offers the first substantial accounts of Darwina€?s mythological theories and their links to Enlightenment Rosicrucianism and Freemansonry, and of the reading of history that emerges from the fragment-poem The Progress of Society, a first-ever printed edition of which is included in an appendix. Ultimately, Priestmana€?s book offers readers a sustained account of Darwina€?s polymathic Enlightenment worldview and cognate poetics in a period when texts are too often judged by their adherence to a retrospectively constructed a€?Romanticisma€?.

Martin Priestman is Professor of English and Co-Director of the Centre for Research in Romanticism at the University of Roehampton, UK.