Erasmus Darwin

Here, high in air, unconscious of the storm,
Thy temple, Nature, rears it's mystic form;
From earth to heav'n, unwrought by mortal toil,
Towers the vast fabric on the desert soil;
(The Temple of Nature, 1803; Canto 1 lines 65-68)


The whirling Sun this ponderous planet hurl'd,
And gave the astonish'd void another world.
When from it's vaporous air, condensed by cold,
Descending torrents into oceans roll'd;
And fierce attraction with relentless force
Bent the reluctant wanderer to it's course.
(The Economy of Vegetation; 1792, Canto 2, lines 15-20)


Neil Evernden speaks of the power of art to change the way we look at the world; one artist he uses as an example of this was Leonardo Da Vinci. Another artist who I think could be pointed to as one who has had a profound influence on the way we view the world is Erasmus Darwin (Charles’ grandfather).
Though stylistically he must be counted among the poets of the earlier period, his visionary approach and his revolutionary and evolutionary ideas certainly move him closer to the Romantic moderns. . . . Darwin's poetic vision taps into the central themes arising in modernity and sets the stage for the Romantic poets and the post-Kantian philosophers that follow. (Page, 2005 p. 168)
Erasmus Darwin was firstly a scientist and secondly a poet. He was also a keen observer of nature and much of his poetry can be seen to describe complex scientific ideas (e.g. the piece from The Economy of Vegetation above). Page (2005) suggests that “[b]ecause of the way Darwin translated this new vision for a wider audience in his poems, it is no exaggeration to see him as the prophet for the scientific worldview that came to dominate the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.” ( p. 147)

However the reason I am attracted to Darwin’s poetry is the mythological and magical imagery he uses in describing scientific phenomenon. Perhaps the same or similar artistic means can be used to reverse the trend that they helped to start; the trend towards the acceptance of a scientific worldview and the exclusion of all other possible views. He used those magical references to help his audience accept the scientific ones. Maybe we can use scientific references to help others accept magical ones! I don’t mean that we should try to bring back the belief in faeries and monsters, but that decreasing our insistence on objective, rational, scientific observation may allow us to see ourselves as subjective participants in nature.


Reference Cited:

Page, Michael. The Darwin Before Darwin: Erasmus Darwin, Visionary Science, and Romantic Poetry Papers on Language and Literature; Spring 2005; 41, 2.