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Introduction
to
THE
TEMPLE
OF NATURE
by
Martin Priestman
-
Erasmus
Darwin's last, defiant,
densely-packed scientific
poem The
Temple of Nature,
or The Origin of
Society was
a crucial influence
on both the Shelleys,
suggesting the
opening
imagery of Percy's Queen
Mab and
the conversation
between him and
Byron about spontaneously-animated "vermicelli" which
helped to inspire
Mary's Frankenstein.1 The
poem also compresses
into its four
cantos
and extensive
annotation
a great deal
of the hard
knowledge,
speculative
brilliance
and poetic
daring
of previous
works
in verse and
prose which
had in their
turn greatly
influenced
Blake, Wordsworth,
Coleridge and
many others.
In what Desmond
King-Hele has
called "a
life of unequalled
achievement," Darwin
touched base
with
almost every
aspect
of the age
of revolutions
we label,
somewhat
inadequately,
The
Romantic
Period.
With fellow
members of
the Birmingham-based
Lunar Society2 such
as James
Watt, Matthew
Boulton,
Josiah Wedgwood
and Joseph
Priestley,
he was a
prime
mover of
the Industrial
Revolution,
and his
agricultural
treatise Phytologia,
or The
Philosophy
of Agriculture
and Gardening (1800)
put the
weight
of his
massive
botanical
knowledge
behind
the Agrarian
one. He
was also
the period's
most successful
physician,
whose
medical
treatise Zoonomia,
or The
Laws
of Organic
Life (1794-6,
revised
1801)
helped
to initiate
the
radically
materialist
psychology
which
Alan
Richardson
terms "neural
Romanticism," and
the
need
to
suppress
which
Edward
S.
Reed
sees
as
the
source
of
a
soul-based
nineteenth-century
psychology.
In
the
other
sciences,
Darwin
attempted
and
often
achieved
new
syntheses
of
the
most
recent,
cutting-edge
work
in
geology,
astronomy,
chemistry
and
the
study
of
electricity;
while
in
zoology
his
arguments
for
the
evolution
of
species—anticipating
those
of
his
grandson
Charles
by
more
than
half
a
century—have
been
described
by
Roy
Porter
as
providing "the
British
Enlightenment's
most
sublime
theory
of
boundless
improvement" (443).
-
Politically,
Darwin was a radical-progressive
Whig. His enthusiasm
for the American
Revolution
was boosted by
personal
friendship with
one
of its fathers,
Benjamin
Franklin; his support
for the early stages
of the French one
was never—as
it was by many
other erstwhile "jacobins"—explicitly
retracted.3 Though
perhaps unwilling
to notice the
new kinds of misery
caused by the
industrial innovations
of friends such
as Boulton and
Wedgwood,4 he
strongly opposed
the slave trade,5 wrote
against the
eviction
of the powerless "people
of agriculture" by
the enclosure
of farm land6 and,
in A
Plan for
the Conduct
of Female
Education
in Boarding
Schools (1797),
supported
womens' right
to a rounded
education
in the arts
and sciences. Such
radical
progressivism
played
well to
an intensely
admiring
public
in his first
literary
breakthrough,
the two-poem
work collectively
titled The
Botanic
Garden (1791),
comprising The
Economy
of Vegetation and
the earlier-published The
Loves
of the
Plants (1789).
The latter
of these
courted
controversy
on three
counts:
by espousing
the still-shocking
classification
of plants
according
to their
sexual
traits
with
which
the Swedish
Carl
Linnaeus
had recently
revolutionized
the study
of botany;7 by
representing
these
traits
in terms
of a series
of increasingly
promiscuous-seeming
human
love affairs;
and by
explicitly
addressing
women
and children
as its
primary
audience.8 The
Economy
of Vegetation,
placed
first
though
published
second,
is primarily
a physico-chemical
account
of matter
and
the formation
of the
earth,
which
thinly
veils
its
underlying
materialism
under
the
figure
of the
Goddess
of Botany
addressing
the sprites
of the
four
traditional
elements,
in a
structure
loose
enough
to allow
for
many
celebrations
of fellow
Lunar
Society
members'
scientific
and
industrial
achievements,
and
for many
assaults
on tyranny
and religious "superstition." But
by the
later
1790s
the
same
attitudes
were
considered
dangerously
libertine,
irreligious
and hence
(in an
increasingly
common
conflation)
pro-French.
The Anti-Jacobin magazine's
1798
parody, "The
Loves
of the
Triangles,"9 devastated
Darwin's
reputation,
deliberately
confusing
his
views
with
those
of
more
declared
radicals
such
as William
Godwin
and
libertines
such
as
Richard
Payne
Knight,10 and
poking—admittedly
hilarious—fun
at
his
common
poetic
device
of
fanciful
personification
as
at
once
outmoded
and heartlessly
frivolous.
-
The
substantial
debts
of Blake, Wordsworth
and Coleridge
to Darwin—especially
to The
Botanic Garden and Zoonomia—have
been increasingly
acknowledged
since Desmond
King-Hele's Erasmus
Darwin
and the
Romantic
Poets (1986). Blake
engraved
some of Botanic
Garden's
illustrations,
and
clearly
drew
on its
plant-personifications
for
his Songs and Book
of Thel.11 Despite
a similar
degree
of
influence
on
their
youthful
work,
Wordsworth's
and
Coleridge's
coming
of
age
as
the
Romantic
poets
we
recognize
coincided
with
their
rejection
of
the
Augustan
poetic
style
of
which
Darwin
was
then
the
leading
representative.
In
1796,
the
then-footloose
Coleridge
spent
several
months
in
Derby,
largely
drawn
thither
by
opportunities
for
conversations
with
Darwin,
who
had
moved
there
from
Lichfield
in
1783
and
seems
to
have
tried
to
help
him
find
work.12 Coleridge's
remark "I
absolutely
nauseate
Darwin's
poem" (i.e. The
Botanic
Garden)
needs
to
be
set
against
many
borrowings13 and
against
his
clearly
overwhelmed
response
to "the
first literary character
in
Europe,
and
the
most
original-minded
man":
Darwin
was "the
everything,
except
the
Christian!
[with]
a
greater
range
of
philosophical
knowledge
than
any
other
man
in
Europe.
.
.
.
He
thinks
in
a new train
on
every
subject," though
the
recent
Unitarian
convert
needed
to
add, "except
religion."14 Wordsworth's
careful
separation,
in
the
1802 Lyrical
Ballads Preface,
of
the "immediate" pleasures
of
poetry
from
the
more
recondite
ones
of
un-"familiarized" scientific
knowledge,
as
well
as
its
rejection
of
personification
and
the "inane
phraseology" of
poetic
diction,
suggests
Darwin
as
the
key
reference-point
against
which
Wordsworth's
new
poetic
defines
itself.
However,
the
same
Preface's
claim
that
the
ballad-form
of "Goody
Blake
and
Harry
Gill" will
give
the
psychological "fact" it
embodies
its
first
real
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