The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

While historians of science have focused significant attention on Erasmus Darwins 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 Darwins 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 Darwins poetry in terms of Darwins broader sense of the poetic text as a material space, he posits a significant shift from the Enlightenments emphases on conceptual spaces to the Romantic periods emphases on historical time. He shows how Darwins poetry illuminates his stance toward all the major physical sciences and his well-formulated theories of evolution and materially based psychology. Priestmans study also offers the first substantial accounts of Darwins 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, Priestmans book offers readers a sustained account of Darwins polymathic Enlightenment worldview and cognate poetics in a period when texts are too often judged by their adherence to a retrospectively constructed Romanticism.