Though he died before his grandson Charles was even born, Erasmus Darwin anticipated the theory of evolution through natural selection, albeit in poetic form. In his posthumously published The Temple of Nature(1803), he writes of how:
Organic life beneath the shoreless waves
Was born and nurs'd in Ocean's pearly caves;
First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,
Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;
These, as successive generations bloom,
New powers acquire, and larger limbs assume;
Whence countless groups of vegetation spring,
And breathing realms of fin and feet and wing.
This verse demonstrates the prescience of the imaginative arts, how poetic dreams can foreshadow empirical reality. Fair to admit that Erasmus's contributions lacked the specificity of his grandson, and that evolutionary thinking goes back to antiquity, but this was a novel way to anticipate natural selection. Poetry has unrealised potential, not just in celebrating and describing nature, but also as an integral way of thinking about nature.
In The Genius of Erasmus Darwin (2005), C U M Smith and Robert Arnott describe the physician, naturalist and poet as ‘the English Leonardo'. Yet this Darwin often merits simply a footnote in his grandson's biography. In The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin: Enlightened Spaces, Romantic Times (2013), Martin Priestman quips that ‘few writers can be so burdened with a surname which so clearly belongs to someone else'. While the younger Darwin provided the scientific mechanism for evolution – and a cursory reading of On the Origin of Species (1859) demonstrates that he was an adept stylist – his grandfather did accomplish something exemplary. Charles enumerated the details of evolution, but Erasmus anticipated its broad outlines; the younger Darwin wrote in prose, and the elder imagined in poetry, arguably the most significant scribbler of scientific verse in English, a sadly neglected genre.
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