A comprehensive study of Darwin's legacy for religion, ecology and the arts. Includes over 50 complete poems and long extracts with an interpretative framework and close readings. Poets examined include Tennyson, Browning, Hardy, Frost, Ted Hughes, Pattia

Widely seen as evolution's founding figure, Charles Darwin is taken by many evolutionists to be the first to propose a truly modern theory of evolution. Darwin's greatness, however, has obscured the man and his work, at times even to the point of distortion. Accessibly written, this book presents a more nuanced picture and invites us to discover some neglected ambiguities and contradictions in Darwin's masterwork. Delisle and Tierney show Darwin to be a man who struggled to reconcile the received wisdom of an unchanging natural world with his new ideas about evolution. Arguing that Darwin was unable to break free entirely from his contemporaries' more traditional outlook, they show his theory to be a fascinating compromise between old and new. Rediscovering this other Darwin – and this other side of On the Origin of Species – helps shed new light on the immensity of the task that lay before 19th century scholars, as well as their ultimate achievements.

"Darwin's Microscope responds to the life and influence of Charles Darwin, and is a poet's celebration of the great biologist's achievement. Kelley Swain uses the microscopic 'lens' as a metaphor for viewing the world with secular wonder, revealing the greater meaning discovered from looking deeper - even to the cellular level. Contemplating the natural world, this young poet brings the Darwinian point of view into everyday life. Darwin's microscope brilliantly shows how science and poetry can complement and enlighten each other, to the point where they become nearly inseparable." --Book Jacket.

The Child is father of the Man; And I could wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety. William Wordsworth, "Ode: Intimations of Immortality" Wallace Stevens said somewhere that the theory of poetry is the life of poetry.l Charles Darwin, who likes poetry, "recognized that at the eost of losing his appreciation of poetry and other things that delighted him in his youth, his mind had become a 'machine for grinding generallaws out of large colleetions of facts.' "2 Somewhere in between the polar positions of Stevens' extreme aesthetic belief and Darwin's extreme meehanistic belief lies the aesthetics of empirical thought and the whole modem Romantic tradition. There have been men in between who were both meehanists and poets, who both beIieved in automatic material meehanisms and tried to use the imagination. Erasmus Darwin was one of these "in between" figures. and since he lived early (1731-1802) in the modem scientific era he was one of the first. This older Darwin, the grandfather of Charles, has not been given due credit as a transitional figure in the development of the literature of our scientific era. Although historically and in terms of intelleetual stature the grandfather was a fanciful child compared to the giant grand soo, Erasmus Darwin's habits of thought anticipated one of the most distinguishing charaeteristics of his grandson. (The genetic suggestive.

Vol. 77- includes Yearbook of the Association, 1931-