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

It may be proper here to apologize for many of the subsequent conjectures on some articles of natural philosophy, as not being supported by accurate investigation or conclusive experiments. Extravagant theories however in those parts of philosophy, where our knowledge is yet imperfect, are not without their use; as they encourage the execution of laborious experiments, or the investigation of ingenious deductions, to confirm or refute them. And since natural objects are allied to each other by many affinities, every kind of theoretic distribution of them adds to our knowledge by developing some of their analogies. The Rosicrucian doctrine of Gnomes, Sylphs, Nymphs, and Salamanders, was thought to afford a proper machinery for a Botanic poem; as it is probable, that they were originally the names of hieroglyphic figures representing the elements. Many of the important operations of Nature were shadowed or allegorized in the heathen mythology, as the first Cupid springing from the Egg of Night, the marriage of Cupid and Psyche, the Rape of Proserpine, the Congress of Jupiter and Juno, Death and Resuscitation of Adonis, &c. many of which are ingeniously explained in the works of Bacon, Vol. V. p. 47. 4th Edit. London, 1778. The Egyptians were possessed of many discoveries in philosophy and chemistry before the invention of letters; these were then expressed in hieroglyphic paintings of men and animals; which after the discovery of the alphabet were described and animated by the poets, and became first the deities of Egypt, and afterwards of Greece and Rome. Allusions to those fables were therefore thought proper ornaments to a philosophical poem, and are occasionally introduced either as represented by the poets, or preserved on the numerous gems and medallions of antiquity.

Focusing on four poets who because of their distinctive profiles illustrate especially well the opportunities and pitfalls of writing science poetry during the long eighteenth century Four Augustan Science Poets: Abraham Cowley, James Thomson, Henry Brooke, Erasmus Darwin offers numerous close readings that shed light not only on standard versions of the sublime but also on these idiosyncratic variants: the apologetic (Abraham Cowley), the illicit (James Thomson), the perverse (Henry Brooke) and the atheistic (Erasmus Darwin). Recurrent concerns include the similarities and differences among the languages of poetry, science and religion. Of the poets analyzed all but Thomson wrote extensive notes to accompany their lines, permitting further comparison of languages, in this case between the same authors’ poetry and prose.

Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802) had the highest reputation among living English poets during much of the 1790s, through the great success of his long poem in rhyming couplets, The Botanic Garden, published complete in 1792. In this new book Desmond King-Hele shows in convincing detail how Darwin greatly influenced five major English Romantic poets, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and Keats, and many other poets of the time, such as Crabbe and Campbell (but not Byron).

Dr Erasmus Darwin seemed an innocuous Midlands physician, a respectable stalwart of eighteenth-century society. But there was another side to him. Botanist, physician, Lunar inventor and popular poet, Darwin was internationally renowned for extraordinary poems explaining his theories about sex and science. Yet he became a target for the political classes, the victim of a sustained and vitriolic character assassination by London's most savage satirists. Intrigued, prize-winning historian Patricia Fara set out to investigate why Darwin had provoked such fierce intellectual and political reaction. Inviting her readers to accompany her, she embarked on what turned out to be a circuitous and serendipitous journey. Her research led her to discover a man who possessed, according to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 'perhaps a greater range of knowledge than any other man in Europe.' His evolutionary ideas influenced his grandson Charles, were banned by the Vatican, and scandalized his reactionary critics. But for modern readers he shines out as an impassioned Enlightenment reformer who championed the abolition of slavery, the education of women, and the optimistic ideals of the French Revolution. As she tracks down her quarry, Patricia Fara uncovers a ferment of dangerous ideas that terrified the establishment, inspired the Romantics, and laid the ground for Victorian battles between faith and science.

First published in 2006, this book is a unique collection of the letters of Erasmus Darwin, revealing his amazing variety of talents.

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