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.

Charles Darwin s book about his grandfather, The Life of Erasmus Darwin, is curiously fascinating. Before publication in 1879, it was shortened by 16%, with several of the cuts directed at its most provocative parts. The cutter, with Charles s permission, was his daughter Henrietta - an example of the strong hidden hand of meek-seeming Victorian women. This first unabridged edition, edited by Desmond King-Hele, includes all that Charles originally intended, the cuts being restored and printed in italics. Erasmus Darwin was one of the leading intellectuals of the eighteenth century. He was a respected physician, a well-known poet, a keen mechanical inventor, and a founding member of the influential Lunar Society. He also possessed an amazing insight into the many branches of physical and biological science. Most notably, he adopted what we now call biological evolution as his theory of life, 65 years prior to Charles Darwin s Origin of Species.

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’.

The Genius of Erasmus Darwin provides insight into the full extent of Erasmus Darwin's exceptional intellect. He is shown to be a major creative thinker and innovator, one of the minds behind the late eighteenth-century industrial revolution, and one of the first, if not the first, to perceive the living world (including humans) as part of a unified evolutionary scenario. The contributions here provide contextual understandings of Erasmus Darwin's thought, as well as studies of particular works and accounts of the later reception of his writings. In this way it is possible to see why the young Samuel Taylor Coleridge was moved to describe Darwin as 'the first literary character in Europe, and the most original-minded man'.Erasmus Darwin, Charles Darwin's grandfather, was one of the leading intellectuals of eighteenth-century England. He was a man with an extraordinary range of interests and activities: he was a doctor, biologist, inventor, poet, linguist and botanist. He was also a founding member of the Lunar Society, an intellectual community that included such eminent men as James Watt and Josiah Wedgwood.

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).

Soon after publication of On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin received a letter that deeply unsettled him. He had expected outrage and accusations of heresy, but this letter was different: it accused him of taking credit for a theory that wasn't his. Yet when he tried to trace his intellectual forebears, he found that history had already forgotten them...Rediscovering Aristotle on the shores of Lesbos and Leonardo da Vinci fossil hunting in the Tuscan hills, this is a masterful retelling of the collective daring of a few like-minded men, whose early theories flew in the face of prevailing political and religious orthodoxies and laid the foundations for Darwin's revolutionary idea.

History, Humanity and Evolution brings together thirteen original essays by prominent scholars in the history of evolutionary thought. The volume is intended both to represent the best of today's research in the field and also to celebrate the work of the distinguished historian, John C. Greene, whose historical writings have had a unique influence on this volume's contributors as well as the field as a whole. Using contemporary sources as diverse as medicine, literature, and natural history tableaux, and drawing on the resources of publishing history, feminist scholarship, and the histories of politics, sociology, and philosophy, the contributors offer new perspectives not only on familiar figures such as Erasmus and Charles Darwin, Lamarck, Chambers, Huxley, and Haeckel, but also on many lesser known participants in the evolutionary debates. The volume contains a fascinating introductory conversation with John C. Greene and an afterword by him that responds to the contributors' essays.