[In the following essay, Hassler argues that the major literary figures of the Romantic movement—Wordsworth, Shelley, Coleridge, Keats, and Byron—were influenced considerably by Darwin's writings, as they reacted to his scientific ideas, his tone of comic defense, and his use of language.]

Men must endure
Their going hence, even as their coming hither:
Ripeness is all.

—William Shakespeare, King Lear

To endure the triumph of life and to settle for only that is very difficult for bumptious man to do. Most of the brilliant Romantic poets who were growing to maturity when Darwin was publishing his works refused to accept the triumph of life and used all of their inventiveness to redefine human nature sufficiently so that life, as science was revealing it, would not triumph. Darwin's pagan or materialistic pessimism, along with his comic devices for living with this pessimism, played an important role as a kind of negative catalyst for the Romantic movement. He dramatized so well, and so unflinchingly, in his life and in his writings the proliferating variousness of things that only he (and perhaps Lord Byron) could fully face the implications.

Darwin did influence several of the Romantics in certain details of technique, and numerous parallels to his verse can be found in the poets who immediately followed him; in fact, Desmond King-Hele gives a fine concrete listing of passages from each of the Romantics that have a possible indebtedness to Darwin.¹ But Darwin's greatest importance to the writers who followed him was simply his presence. Although he was not revolutionary at all as a writer (unless we grant him a little more art than even I am willing to admit in his skillful fusing of prose, verse, scientific subject matter, and tone), his effect on the Romantic poets was like the effect of the French Revolution: he fascinated and terrified them by showing what could happen if fecund, raw nature is unveiled in her hundred-breasted splendor. For example, Wordsworth incorporated much of the egalitarianism and secularism of the French Revolution into his mature poems at the same time that he rejected the open-endedness, the rationalism, and the Lockean empiricism that encouraged men to manipulate each other in a revolutionary way. The Romantics were driven to make a revolution of the spirit by the terror that accompanied the actual Revolution and its materialism. Darwin helped to drive them and also, like the Revolution, provided some of the ideas that they found and redefined for their own purposes.

The general public made an early and accurate recognition of Darwin's materialism, which it would be worthwhile to notice before explaining the more subtle response and reaction of the poets. As early as 1794 an anonymous poem, entitled The Golden Age, appeared that alleged to be “from Erasmus D———n M.D. to Thomas Beddoes M.D.”² Actually a fierce attack on Darwin and Beddoes, the poem accused them of being Democrats and atheists, but the possibility and demand for such a poem indicates that the consensus was already present in the public mind. Similarly, the parody of Darwin in The Anti-Jacobin, entitled “The Loves of the Triangles,” which appeared a few years later, indicates that it was easy and fashionable to accuse Darwin of ridiculous speculative flights.³ Then in 1798 a book-length refutation of Zoonomia appeared that contained 560 pages of systematic refutation of each of Darwin's points and that finally condemned him as simply a materialist.⁴

Darwin's stock went steadily down throughout the nineteenth century. Robert Chamberlain has pointed out, for instance, that George Crabbe revised The Library in 1807 in order to take from it any resemblance to Darwin's poems. In the original version of the poem in 1781, Crabbe had described the sexual system of plant classification of Linnaeus in a way which Darwin then developed at great length in The Loves of the Plants. In the revised version, however, Crabbe “cleanses his own passage of its coy sexuality and makes pointed critical references to Darwin's Loves.”⁵

Darwin's bad reputation in the press and in the reviews of his works by the end of the century (which, incidentally, severely hurt the reception of The Temple of Nature) was, in part, fostered by the fact that even Darwin's friends, or the children of his friends, began to see him as a Jacobin and atheist. Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck, the daughter of Samuel Galton, reports in her Memoirs that, when she was a child, the large Doctor Darwin frightened her not only because of his size but because of his “Jacobinism”; and she then describes the lack of spirituality in his poems: “there is everything to fix the eye below, on what is transient and mutable; nothing to raise it above, to the permanent and immutable; there is all in it to delight the eye or ear, nothing to touch the well-springs of the heart. It is a beautiful body, delicate, symmetrical, faultless, but it is destitute of soul.”⁶

I WORDSWORTH

In Book XI of The Prelude, Wordsworth tells us that he has turned away from Godwinian rationalism in despair because, to use the words of Mrs. Schimmelpenninck who was probably thinking of Wordsworth or his Victorian imitators, it was “destitute of soul.” This section is well known, and from it I quote the ending in the 1850 version:

                              till, demanding formal proof,
And seeking it in every thing, I lost
All feeling of conviction, and, in fine,
Sick, wearied out with contrarieties,
Yielded up moral questions in despair.

(Bk. XI, 11. 301-5)

Wordsworth goes on in The Prelude to describe his rediscovery of soul—a rediscovery that is verbalized again and again but perhaps most effectively in the passage that narrates Wordsworth's ascent of Mount Snowdon:

… it appeared to me the type
Of a majestic intellect, its acts
And its possessions, what it has and craves,
What in itself it is, and would become.
There I beheld the emblem of a mind
That feeds upon infinity, that broods
Over the dark abyss, intent to hear
Its voices issuing forth to silent light
In one continuous stream; …
Such minds are truly from the Deity,
For they are Powers; and hence the highest bliss
That flesh can know is theirs—the consciousness
Of Whom they are, habitually infused
Through every image and through every thought,
And all affections by communion raised
From earth to heaven, from human to divine.(7)

The significant thing about this description is that it seems to be describing equally well the annihilation of the self, its literal infusion (not just seeing) “into the life of things.”⁸ Geoffrey Hartman interprets another central passage in The Prelude about the sudden rediscovery of self, the Simplon Pass episode, in just this way: what Wordsworth discovers “usurps” the ordinary human self.⁹ Northrop Frye, in discussing Thomas Lovell Beddoes, gives the best interpretation, however, of this Romantic discovery of a more organic and profound self, or human nature. Perhaps it is significant that Thomas Lovell Beddoes was the son of the imitator and comic confrere of Darwin, Dr. Thomas Beddoes; for the brittle comic shell of the father may have helped push the son toward the discovery of the ultimate self that Frye describes:

The feeling that the moment of death is also a crisis of identity is probably as old as human consciousness, and certainly as old as written literature. But it starts out on a new and lonelier journey with the Romantic movement, a journey with a continuous sense that, as Eliot says, the moment of death is every moment, and that absurdity is the only visible form of the meaning of life. It is Beddoes, as far as English literature is concerned, who brings us most directly into contact with the conception of the absurd. …¹⁰

Darwin refuses to confront the dumb center of absurdity that Wordsworth confronts at Simplon Pass and on Mount Snowdon; indeed, Darwin refuses to annihilate his human self in the new definition of human nature that was pending at the turn of the century. (Perhaps it is just that he refuses to lose his life in order to save it.) As a defense, then, Darwin draws a circle of words and myths around that dumb center; and he adopts the facetious tone that nervously keeps talking even though it is not sure of its “self.” Darwin, in a manner similar to Godwin, pushed Wordsworth toward his discoveries. And Darwin also contributed, unlike Godwin, the facetious literary tone that he was using as comic defense; but such a tone rankled on the serious Wordsworth: “Depressed, bewildered thus, I did not walk / With scoffers, seeking light and gay revenge / From indiscriminate laughter. …”¹¹

Actually, Darwin in his scientific writing had made the discovery of the organic self, or the absurd self. He had been unwilling, however, to surrender to it; hence he did not evolve the tone and symbolic imagery that Wordsworth did, perhaps because of his age. Darwin saw into his vision of nature after he had grown to middle age and had become sure of, and comfortable in, a certain civilized notion of self, which he then protected from his vision. Wordsworth, who saw Darwin's vision as a young man, gave himself up to it, at least in his early career. Wordsworth may even have seen it in passages such as the following from Zoonomia because we know he used Darwin's treatise for “Goody Blake and Harry Gill”; the passage is Darwin's bland way of discovering that all creatures are probably united in some way: “Owing to the imperfection of language the offspring is termed a new animal, but is in truth a branch or elongation of the parent; since a part of the embryon-animal is, or was, a part of the parent; and therefore in strict language it cannot be said to be entirely new at the time of its production; and therefore it may retain some of the habits of the parent-system.”¹²

Wordsworth, in fact, “perfects” the language of Darwin's passage to the point that he can express through a poetic symbol the “parent-child-system”:

Hence in a season of calm weather
Though inland far we be,
Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,
Can in a moment travel hither,
And see the Children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.(13)

Darwin's influence is much greater, however, than actual verbal echoes from his writing that may be discovered in Wordsworth, in Coleridge, or in any other Romantic poet; but, although some verbal echoes have been indicated earlier in this book, the nature of Darwin's influence is such that we would actually expect verbal echoes to be minimal. In fact, a clear understanding of the relationship of Darwin to Wordsworth helps us to see in a general, inclusive way the very essence of the Romantic change in literature that, whether or not a direct cause-and-effect influence can be proved (if such a thing can ever be proved), the contiguity of the two is the most instructive fact. Wordsworth's general reaction to Darwin and the notion that his Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1800, was in particular a nervous refutation of Darwin have been noticed by many critics.¹⁴ But Samuel H. Monk in an article on Anna Seward, who was so close to Darwin, pinpoints the major change that Wordsworth helped to bring about: the acceptance of the possibilities of organic growth in poetry. To Professor Monk, the whole Romantic movement flowered once this organic power was unleashed:

There is never a hint in her writing that she valued a poem for anything beyond its meretricious ornaments or its sentiments. Poetry as a complex structure of language that arranges experience in enduringly true and significant patterns did not occur to her mind. It is inevitable that her view of poetry should have led her to admire Darwin's verses, for they, as well as her own, were the embodiment of her taste. …

Miss Seward is useful in reminding us that there was, none the less, a romantic movement: … something new was added, as the human mind underwent one of those alterations of structure that periodically have led it to reinterpret the world and the significance of human life. And such a change in the fundamental structure of human perceptions lies behind all the so-called “schools” that literary historians have pointed out to us. …

Romantic poetry, when it came full blown, was beyond her ken.¹⁵

Darwin, unlike Miss Seward, did see the new structure of the mind that was emerging through the study of flowing nature. But he held back from it. And so a difference in tone is the major difference between Wordsworth and Darwin.

II COLERIDGE

The tone of comic defense and holding back, however, is not entirely alien to the Romantic poets; and Darwin's intellectuality, which is nearly synonymous with comic defense, may have had a significant and direct influence on Coleridge. Certainly Coleridge, like Wordsworth, felt the negative influence of what he called “Gaudyverse,” and he speaks scornfully of “Darwinizing”: “Into this error the author of The Botanic Garden has fallen, through the whole of which work, I will venture to assert, there are not twenty images described as a man would describe them in a state of excitement. The poem is written with all the tawdry industry of a milliner anxious to dress up a doll in silks and satins. Dr. Darwin laboured to make his style fine and gaudy, by accumulating and applying all the sonorous and handsome-looking words in our language. This is not poetry. …”¹⁶

In Coleridge's greatest poems, he, of course, never “dresses up” the doll with ornamental artifice. He believes in the organic imagination, and has produced some of the greatest fruits of it. But, at the same time, Coleridge, much more than Wordsworth, emphasizes the frightening unacceptability and the real sublime terror of the imagination. In Coleridge at his best, the discovery of the self in imagination is not just tantamount to death; it is a kind of hell after death as well or, what is worse, an unattainable state. The Ancient Mariner is an obsessed and plagued man; Christabel is haunted, cursed, and/or perverted; but worse than these is the condition of the speakers in “Kubla Khan” and “Dejection: An Ode” who can never achieve the organic imagination and, in fact, fall back on a kind of “gaudiness” even though they desperately want the self-discovery of the organic imagination.

Since there is no question that Coleridge read a great deal of Darwin's prose and verse,¹⁷ I suggest that his wonderfully effective ambivalence toward the imagination is, in part, a more refined version of Darwin's comic tone. The pleasure-done of Xanadu and the domes of the Temple of Nature may be more closely related than has yet been admitted: they both represent unattainable ideals of organic unity.¹⁸ When Darwin was faced with the impossibility and with the absurdity of finding or making one central unity, he compensated by continually making categories and by writing very intellectual treatises and notes—by spiraling out on the periphery of the circle.¹⁹ Coleridge did precisely the same thing in his numerous critical, religious, and political treatises. Coleridge did produce a few wonderful flowers of the organic imagination, but most of the time he “Darwinized.” Is that tendency an influence or just a contiguity?

One debt that Coleridge probably owes to Darwin is in literary theory, for Elizabeth Schneider argues very effectively that Coleridge got much of his notion of “dramatic illusion” and “the willing suspension of disbelief” from Darwin: “In his treatment of this whole subject Coleridge is much closer to Darwin than to any other predecessor that I know of. Darwin's ideas were, of course, not wholly original. … But a glance at Darwin's most notable predecessors (Kames, Burke, Hartley) serves only to emphasize … the extent of his apparent influence on Coleridge.”²⁰

A few of the most cogent sentences from Zoonomia recall Darwin's clear-sighted honesty, or intellectuality. At the end of the passage, Darwin observes that some dramatists must still rely on the “rules” because, presumably, their works do not have the verve or organic unity to stand alone. Strict intellectual analysis must show (as Locke discovered) that nothing can stand alone, short of its death and inclusion with all other things. In addition to giving Coleridge the notion of dramatic illusion, Darwin's writings must have impressed him with the unillusioned despair or “dejection” that strict intellectuality yields:

So when we are enveloped in deep contemplation of any kind, or in reverie, as in reading a very interesting play or romance, we measure time very inaccurately; and hence, if a play greatly affects our passions, the absurdities of passing over many days or years, and of perpetual changes of place, are not perceived by the audience; as is experienced by every one, who reads or sees some plays of the immortal Shakespear; but it is necessary for inferior authors to observe those rules … inculcated by Aristotle, because their works do not interest the passions sufficiently to produce complete reverie.²¹

At one point in the Biographia Literaria, Coleridge speaks reluctantly about Darwin's pedantry and highly intellectual use of old categories; and implies, as he does throughout his criticism, that Darwin's careful juggling of distinctions (some of Darwin's jugglings are not careful, but Coleridge objects even to the careful ones) is tedious and foolish compared to the poetic penetration to organic unities. But within a page Coleridge is doing the same thing himself. Just as Darwin in Zoonomia and Phytologia understood the organic, plantlike connections of all life but made them seem more mechanical by using categorical discourse and analogy, so Coleridge in Biographia Literaria explains organic synthesis in literature but continually breaks the synthesis with distinctions and qualifications—with intellectuality. Although Zoonomia is a medical treatise and although the Biographia Literaria is literary criticism, the two works are very similar in their circular diffuseness, as when Coleridge writes:

The first lesson of philosophic discipline is to wean the student's attention from the degrees of things, which alone form the vocabulary of common life, and to direct it to the kind abstracted from degree. … In such discourse the instructor has no other alternative than either to use old words with new meanings (the plan adopted by Darwin in his Zoonomia,) or to introduce new terms, after the example of Linnaeus, and the framers of the present chemical nomenculture. The latter mode is evidently preferable, were it only that the former demands a twofold exertion of thought in one and the same act. For the reader, or hearer, is required not only to learn and bear in mind the new definition; but to unlearn, and keep out of his view, the old and habitual meaning; a far more difficult and perplexing task, and for which the mere semblance of eschewing pedantry seems to me an inadequate compensation.²²

Thus, although Coleridge in particular eschews it, the literary effect that much of his writing creates is that of manifold exertion of thought; and Dr. Darwin is one of his masters.

Even with all this negative influence, however, it should still be pointed out that Darwin helped to lay the intellectual foundation for what Morse Peckham calls “organicism.”²³ Even though Darwin himself held back from the acceptance of organicism, his influence on Coleridge and Wordsworth should finally be discussed in terms of organicism. As we have noted, Darwin did not fully believe in organicism; but his poems at the end of the century embodied the most extravagant statements of the principle of a living universe, of the notion of joy permeating all nature, and of personified plant life. Organicism was simply the extension of and full acquiescence to these ideas so that what Meyer Abrams calls “the theory of vegetable genius” could be put into practice. Although, as Abrams indicates, the notion of describing human nature and creativity in terms of plant growth goes well back into the eighteenth century, particularly in German thought, Darwin would certainly be a source of the idea for both Coleridge and Wordsworth.²⁴

In a way, this plugging into the paradoxes of a living universe in which one loses his life in order to save it is also a revitalizing of images from the Bible. For example, the first Psalm uses the plant image to describe the spiritually, or imaginatively, alive person:

Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful …

And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season; his leaf also shall not wither; and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper.

The ungodly are not so: but are like the chaff which the wind driveth away.

It takes a great deal of psychic energy to maintain the belief that some plants do not turn to chaff—that death can be overcome within the natural processes of organic growth. Darwin was ruthlessly tough-minded and “scornful,” so that, even though he wrote about the vegetable power in all of us, he never let himself become illusioned that his was an adequate description of human nature. Human nature, for him, was always less like the perfect flower and more like the chaff, the something different, that could not be saved.

III SHELLEY

Shelley, like Darwin, could not accept the plant-growth definition of human nature and human salvation, but neither could he live with Darwin's skeptical, comic materialism for long. Shelley finally forged himself a belief that placed no value on the organic realities of this world (let life triumph); instead, he placed all value on the human will to love and on Neoplatonic otherworldly realities. Strangely enough, Shelley seems quite indebted to Darwin's ideas, especially in his later Neoplatonic beliefs; and the reason is that, even though eventually Shelley renounced all details of this world, he still had to find images and rhetorical devices with which to clothe his Platonism. He used, in general, details derived from his earlier fascination with science and, in particular, glittery, garish imagery reminiscent of The Botanic Garden. In other words, the “dome of many-coloured glass” that he was continually trying to break through was colored with glossy images from Darwin's materialism.²⁵ Indeed, Desmond King-Hele thinks that Shelley, of all the Romantics, benefited the most from Darwin's writings: “when Shelley came to develop his unique style of ‘lyricized science,’ Darwin's work was the obvious starting point. And, more important, Darwin had been unjustly attacked by reactionaries. … Shelley automatically admired anyone who had been vilified because he glowed with too ardent a love for freedom, and this alone is enough to explain his addiction to Darwin.”²⁶

In his early work, Shelley could benefit directly from Darwin, not only from his atheism and radicalism, but also from his theories and descriptions of nature. For example, Darwin's elaborate attempt in Zoonomia to explain all animal events in terms of “catenation of motion” must have supported Shelley in what K. N. Cameron calls his “Necessitarianism.” Although Godwin and the French materialists were the greatest influence on Shelley's notion of Necessity, he certainly found supporting detail also in Zoonomia; and Cameron, elsewhere in his book, makes the case strongly that Shelley knew Darwin's work well.²⁷

Indeed, the notes to “Queen Mab” that describe Necessity read much like Darwin's daring attempts to find links-and-motion relationships between all things from physics to literary criticism. In fact, this encyclopedic expansiveness of Shelley the early pamphleteer and note writer is exactly the effect that all of Darwin's encyclopedic poems and treatises give. Shelley, at first, is an atheist, a materialist, and a necessitarian.

Darwin's notion of the transmission of willed characteristics in evolution, as he explains it in the section “Of Generation” in Zoonomia …, is not really a very grand notion of either free will or love. As for the relationship of these concepts of Darwin to the direction that Shelley's later ideas took, he asserted in his last works, the most grandiose hopes for man's freedom of will; and he placed love at the center of man's free existence. Darwin's works about love and sexual pleasure undoubtedly bolstered Shelley's championing of love in “Epipsychidion” and Prometheus Unbound; but, when Darwin talked about love, it was mostly with a slightly facetious tone. He talked mostly about sex, and then about comic, married love as a compromise solution to the problem of never achieving total love. Shelley saw no limits to love, and “Epipsychidion” in particular is a breathless celebration of ideal, perfect union. If he learned anything from Darwin's Zoonomia about controlling sexuality, he certainly improved on the Doctor's cynicism.

Shelley's greatest improvement, however, was in the versification of scientifically understood phenomena. Shelley literally goes all the way in intellectualizing and humanizing natural events. His later poetry attributes human will to everything in nature, which is going several steps further than comically asserting that there is something human over-against phenomena. Perhaps Shelley did learn from Darwin the basic figure of speech for saying that a thunderstorm, for instance, is an act of love (as he does in “The Cloud” and as Darwin does in several meteorological anecdotes in The Economy of Vegetation that were quoted earlier in this book). But in Shelley the implications are taken literally; and the result is a more energetic version of versified science, if perhaps a little more illusioned.

“The Cloud” is often cited as an example of Darwin's influence on Shelley, but the influence may also be seen in Prometheus Unbound, a much greater poem.²⁸ Milton Wilson, in his fine study of the poem, says that the main focus has to be on “the meanwhile” because Shelley has no way of describing what things will be like after the revolution of love.²⁹ Thus, a characteristic passage in Prometheus Unbound will describe and animate phenomena only to say that this will all have to pass, as in the following discussion between two fauns early in the play:

I have heard those more skilled in spirits say,
The bubbles, which the enchantment of the sun
Sucks from the pale faint water-flowers that pave
The cozy bottom of clear lakes and pools,
Are the pavilions where such dwell and float
Under the green and golden atmosphere
Which noontide kindles through the woven leaves;
And when these burst, and the thin fiery air,
The which they breathed within those lucent domes,
Ascends to flow like meteors through the night,
They ride on them, and rein headlong speed,
And bow their burning crests, and glide in fire
Under the waters of the earth again.
          First Faun. If such live thus, have others other
          lives,
Under pink blossoms or within the bells
Of meadow flowers, or folded violets deep,
Or on their dying odours, when they die,
Or in the sunlight of the sphered dew?
          Second Faun. Ay, many more which we may well
          divine.
But, should we stay to speak, noontide would come,
And thwart Silenus find his goats undrawn,
And grudge to sing those wise and lovely songs
Of Fate, and Chance, and God, and Chaos old.(30)

Shelley is fascinated by the Darwinian world of amorous elements, water images, and electricity; but he must also develop the abstractions of the poem. His passage seems even more evanescent and vital than Darwin, possibly because he is a better poet or because he believes more fully in the animation of all nature.

Later in Shelley's play, after Prometheus is set free but before Earth gets totally dissolved in the revolution, she speaks; and one of her speeches sounds to me much like Darwin's paean to birth at the end of Canto IV of The Economy of Vegetation. … Here again, Shelley states that he is only describing the “meanwhile,” and perhaps for that reason the animation of natural phenomena seems even more vital than in Darwin:

          The Earth. I hear, I feel;
The lips [Prometheus'] are on me, and their touch runs down
Even to the adamantine central gloom
Along these marble nerves; ‘tis life, ‘tis joy,
And through my withered, old, and icy frame
The warmth of an immortal youth shoots down
Circling. Henceforth the many children fair
Folded in my sustaining arms; all plants,
And creeping forms, and insects rainbow-winged,
And birds, and beasts, and fish, and human shapes,
Which drew disease and pain from my wan bosom,
Draining the poison of despair, shall take
And interchange sweet nutriment; …
Death is the veil which those who live call life:
They sleep, and it is lifted: and meanwhile
In mild variety the seasons mild
With rainbow-skirted showers, and oderous winds,
And long blue meteors cleansing the dull night,
And the life-kindling shafts of the keen sun's
All-piercing bow, and the dew-mingled rain
Of the calm moonbeams, a soft influence mild,
Shall clothe the forests and the fields, ay, even
The crag-built deserts of the barren deep,
With ever-living leaves, and fruits, and flowers.(31)

Darwin wrote of the earth, using his characteristic circular imagery, that “the vast surface kindles as it rolls.”³² Shelley takes this vitalism and kindles it further, right beyond the material world. But, before the revolution actually comes, he writes many lines that seem indebted to Darwin's vibrant descriptions of circling seeds, misty planets, and panting lovers.

IV KEATS

The well-known difference between Shelley and Keats as craftsmen of Romantic verse can be illustrated by the different kinds of imagery that appealed to them in Darwin.³³ Darwin's images of the misty, evanescent, and amorous forces of electricity and water vapor were what interested Shelley³⁴, but Keats responded to the more solid images of buds and vases in Darwin. In fact, Keats harks back to the organicism of the early Romantics and to the acceptance of ripeness in material things. Bernard Blackstone, who more than any other critic has discovered profound analogies between Keats and Darwin, observes that, in addition to their being associated with medicine, both used images from animal and plant anatomy in their verse: “There was an attraction, and I think it was primarily an attraction of subject, not of style: Keats liked Darwin's morphology, his buds and fruits and seed-cases (the illustrations are a pleasing feature of The Botanic Garden).”³⁵ Philip Ritterbush has recently expanded Blackstone's ideas to suggest that the pattern of Keats's entire career follows that of Darwin's:

The literary scholar Bernard Blackstone has drawn a parallel between the urn, the human work of art, and the fruit, swollen by genial growth. This was Keats' “vast idea,” as he called it in Sleep and Poetry (1818), “The end and aim of Poesy.” Also in this poem he wrote of “the small Breath of new buds and unfolding.” The swelling of organic forms is a recurrent feature of Keats' poetry, abundantly suggestive of the culminating symbol of the experience of beauty, the Grecian Urn. Blackstone points out that the two volumes of Erasmus Darwin's Botanic Garden had opened in 1789 with drawings of cross-sections of flowers and concluded in 1791 with engravings (by William Blake) of the Portland Vase.³⁶

I hesitate to insist on such elaborate analogies between the poetry of Darwin and Keats; for, like each of the Romantics, Keats disavowed any influence from Darwin: in a letter of 1816, he thought it “no mean gratification to become acquainted with Men who in their admiration of Poetry do not jumble together Shakespeare and Darwin.”³⁷ But Keats could not have helped being aware of literary devices that Darwin had used flamboyantly and that he himself was attempting to revitalize. In particular, the use of Greek myth was something that Keats took very seriously toward the end of his short career. Indeed, Darwin's poeticizing of the Eleusinian mysteries and his lengthy footnotes are to modern mythographers such as Jacob Bryant and William Warburton, what helped to pave the way for Keats's experiments in a poem like Hyperion.³⁸

A more important device that, in fact, becomes Keats's major subject matter is the verbal thickness, the rich, sensuous texture involved in capturing the “ripe” moment. Many critics agree Keats finally realized that he could never, as he desired to do, use myth and ideas to discover significant knowledge. In other words, even though he tries ambitiously for ideas, Keats's final literary effect in his greatest poems, such as the odes of 1819 and the ode “To Autumn,” is one of skepticism—the same familiar pattern of Darwin's quest for knowledge. Also like Darwin, Keats had to invent some compensation for the absence of knowledge; and Walter Jackson Bate has described beautifully the profound vision that Keats was developing into the dilemma of human aloneness and ignorance:

only a year before [1818], that “eternal fierce destruction” whereby one thing feeds on another, [had he been reading Zoonomia?] which shocks the heart when we look “too far into the sea,” could seem somewhat more alien to the nature of life and separable from it in our thinking. But the moments were now increasing when much of what we include in the word “evil” seemed inextricably knit into the very nature of that same finitude which also permits a finite creature to exist at all: death, the transitoriness in other ways of what we love, the sheer fact that we cannot proceed in one direction without giving up the opportunity to proceed in others, and that the capacity to enjoy the present moment is as limited and elusive as the present itself. So also with the sharp eager concentration of the living creature as, in its brief finitude, it hurries instinctively to its purposes, enmeshed in activity from the moment of its birth: inevitably its focus is limited and distorted.³⁹

The beauty of this dilemma is that the full facing of it, as Keats did, produces a sense of fulfilled joy, the tragic joy of ripeness. As we have noted, Darwin always held back from this tragic joy, just as he held back from the immense self-discovery of Wordsworth and Coleridge: and Darwin's compensation for the absence of knowledge becomes his glittery laughter and nervous rationality. But perhaps his glitter also helped to teach Keats his compensation—how “to load every rift with ore.” When we compare the following description of the sexual awakening of butterflies from The Temple of Nature to the famous “frozen moment” of Madeline going to sleep from The Eve of St. Agnes, which is quoted immediately following, we should note the change from Darwin's facetiousness to Keats's seriousness:

Web within web involves his larva form,
Alike secured from sunshine and from storm;
For twelve long days He dreams of blossom'd groves,
Untasted honey, and ideal loves;
Wakes from his trance, alarm'd with young Desire,
Finds his new sex, and feels ecstatic fire.
Flown, like a thought, until the morrow-day;
Blissfully havened both from joy and pain;
Clasped like a missal where swart Paynims pray;
Blinded alike from sunshine and from rain,
As though a rose should shut, and be a bud again.(40)

Aside from Keats's fourth line that seems to be almost a literal borrowing of Darwin's second line, the passages are the reverse of each other: the first waking up to bouncy, facetious love, the second heavy with serious fulfillment. In any case, for both Keats and Darwin skepticism forces them to cherish the budding moment of fulfillment. Darwin does so with laughter because he realizes how tenuous such moments are; Keats, who bears down heavily with organic sensuousness, hopes the continual Romantic hope: that he will be able to forge solidity through a concrete rendering of flux and change.

V BYRON

Whereas each of the other Romantics—Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats—looked for, and succeeded in finding, discoveries in the real world (the objective correlatives) to substantiate their belief in a new human significance, Lord Byron looked only in himself for significance; and he was, therefore, the most skeptical of the Romantics. As a result, the literary effect of his great poem, Don Juan, is not one of sensuous imagery or of transcendental insight but one almost entirely of the voice. And the voice, of course, is a laughing, twisting, amorphous voice that finally achieves what we might call “permanence” because of its very variety. In other words, Byron at his mature best is a comic writer who does not believe in free will—or in anything—but who talks about this skepticism enough, and with enough changes in tone, that he creates the only freedom possible: a kind of freedom in despair, a freedom of voice.

Although King-Hele stretches somewhat to find some echoes of Darwin in Byron's thought, there are really no direct echoes.⁴¹ Byron included a verse paragraph on Darwin in his early attack on everyone, but the passage in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers does not tell us much more than that Byron was flailing around in search of his own voice. In fact, he calls Darwin: “That mighty master of unmeaning rhyme, / Whose gilded cymbals, more adorn'd than clear, / The eye delighted, but fatigued the ear; …”⁴² Byron attributes to Darwin exactly what the speaker in Don Juan does in years to come: he fatigues with the somewhat unclear variety of his voice.⁴³ It may seem suspicious to celebrate literature for being unclear; but, if a writer finds that there are no clear ideas to deal with, the one solution open to him is to do a stylistic dance around this absence of knowledge. Without doubt, Lord Byron has taught us much about the complexities of tone and comic dancing, but Darwin too was beginning to take first steps in this modern, skeptical dance.

A recent article on the Gothic novel argues that Byron is closer to the “cosmic despair” (skepticism) of unresolved paradoxes, which the Gothic novel expresses, than he is to the Romantic belief. Although Darwin again is left unnoticed, the following interpretation of Byron could be applied with profit to Darwin: “where Gothic remains darkened by the necessary ambiguities of its conclusions, romantic writing assumes the ultimate existence, if not the easy accessibility, of clear answers to the problems which torment man in this world … a writer like Byron seems closer to the Gothic camp than to the romantics. … Perhaps it is his Augustan affinities which so severely undermine his faith in the transcendent power of imagination, but Byron's cosmic despair is not offset even by his glorying in the mysterious grandeur of heroes modeled on himself. … Byron shows few signs of faith in the romantic metaphysic; his escape from his existential predicament, if it comes at all, comes in the comic perspective of Don Juan.”⁴⁴

Thus, even though in Byron there are fewer direct echoes of Darwin, I hear the most meaningful echo of all in a similar literary effect. In fact, to me Byron and Darwin sound the most modern of all the poets discussed in this chapter because they have no illusions whatsoever. And despite the fact that they never met (Byron did meet Dr. Francis Darwin, one of Erasmus Darwin's sons),⁴⁵ I think Byron would have liked the honest, old stammering Doctor, who in spite of his stammer, or perhaps because of it, invented a distinctive voice in his writing.

VI CONCLUSION

To be a writer, as Darwin was, writing just before a great revolutionary change in literature proves difficult on one's future literary reputation and evaluation. Darwin could have had little idea, of course, how obsolete his writings would seem in the second half of the twentieth century. His philosophic and scientific ideas seem more contemporary to us, and he is generally given some mention in the histories of science as an early evolutionist. It is in the histories of literature, however, that he needs to be taken more seriously, and here as a writer not an evolutionist, for to continue to have our histories of literature blinded by the glory of the Romantic revolution is to be myopic indeed. Darwin needs to be seen in a new light as a writer.

Although medicine, theoretical natural philosophy (science), and technology occupied much of Darwin's energy, he found time to produce a remarkable amount of highly literary writing. He possessed the familiar traits of the writer: a desire for literary fame coupled with a reticence and lack of self-confidence that forced him to write more and more to prove his genius. He used his scientific interests to provide subject matter for his writings in a way that the twentieth century should find particularly interesting, but most significant was his continual effort to make this scientific material literary. Darwin worked hard at being a writer, even a poet, and this should not be forgotten. He also possessed the writer's fascination with language, with the tricks and texture of language; and he wanted to use these tricks of language to help solve human problems. Darwin is seldom mentioned as a moral writer, one interested in improving man's relation to man; but the meaning of his comic literary effect is literally to help men lead their lives.

Despite these characteristics of the true writer, Darwin will no doubt always be categorized as a minor writer: never quite doing what he intended to do with enough force. But most writers are minor writers in this sense, and they seem more human to us for it. Perhaps the final word on Darwin here should come from a scientist, since Darwin's skepticism was the Lockean skepticism of the scientist. The following tribute by Loren Eiseley is not actually to Erasmus Darwin, but to his continuing seed and grandson, Charles Darwin. It is significant and ironic that Darwin's own individuality, which his comic defense maintained, is not finally what will be described in this book about him. Or, in another sense, this simply proves the Doctor right: he has lost his individuality, but his “catenation” with a grandson that he never saw carries on. The following statement speaks for them both, except that the older Darwin laughed a lot in his pity:

None of his forerunners has left us such a message; none saw, in a similar manner, the whole vista of life with quite such sweeping vision. None, it may be added, spoke with the pity which infuses these lines: “If we choose to let conjecture run wild, then animals, our fellow brethren in pain, disease, suffering and famine—our slaves in the most laborious works, our companions in our amusements—they may partake of our origin in one common ancestor—we may be all melted together.”⁴⁶

Notes

1. See King-Hele, Erasmus Darwin (London, 1963), pp. 133-52. A recent article has discovered a possible indebtedness to Darwin in William Cowper's “Yardley Oak,” in English Language Notes, V, 1 (September, 1967), 27-32. I refer the reader to these explorations of line and word resemblances, but my present chapter attempts to pin down Darwin's larger relationship to the Romantics—in some cases, this involves comparison of lines.

2. Anon., The Golden Age (Rivington, London, 1794). See King-Hele's description of it.

3. “The Loves of the Triangles”—“A Mathematical and Philosophical Poem, inscribed to Dr. Darwin” began to appear in installments in The Anti-Jacobin on April 16, 1798. Three weeks later, on May 7, the last installment of the parody appeared; it was apparently devastating in its effect on Darwin's literary reputation. The authors of the parody were probably George Canning, Hookham Frere, and George Ellis. Anon., Poems of the Anti-Jacobin (London, 1801), pp. 118-51.

4. Thomas Brown, Observations on the Zoonomia of Erasmus Darwin (Edinburgh, 1798). For details about the vicious attacks in the 1790's on Darwin's radicalism see Irwin Primer, “Erasmus Darwin's Temple of Nature: Progress, Evolution, and Eleusinian Mysteries,” in Journal of Ideas, XXV (January-March, 1964), 73-74.

5. See Robert L. Chamberlain, “George Crabbe and Darwin's Amorous Plants,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology, LXI (1962), 852.

6. Mary Anne Schimmelpennick, Life of … (London, 1858), I, 205.

7. Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book XIV, 11. 66-74, 113-18.

8. See Wordsworth, “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey,” 1. 49.

9. See Geoffrey H. Hartman, Wordsworth's Poetry 1787-1814 (New Haven and London), p. 16. Also see The Prelude, Book VI, 1. 600.

10. Northrop Frye, A Study of English Romanticism (New York, 1968), p. 85.

11. Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book XI, 11. 321-23.

12. Zoonomia, I, 480. I quoted this passage earlier in the chapter on his scientific writing, and other pages of that chapter are relevant to this discussion. For Wordsworth's acquaintance with Zoonomia, see Mark L. Reed, Wordsworth; the Chronology of the Early Years, 1770-1799 (Cambridge, 1967), p. 224.

13. Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” 11. 161-67.

14. See Chester F. Chapin, Personification in Eighteenth-Century English Poetry (New York, 1968), originally printed 1954, p. 82. Chapin quotes Frederick Pottle as saying, “Wordsworth's famous essay on poetic diction is from beginning to end an anxious attack on the poetry of Erasmus Darwin.”

15. Samuel H. Monk, “Anna Seward and the Romantic Poets,” in E. L. Griggs, ed., Wordsworth and Coleridge: Studies in Honor of George McLean Harper (Princeton, 1939), pp. 124, 133.

16. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Shakespearean Criticism, Thomas Middleton Raysor, ed. (New York, 1960), II, 42. Also see George McLean Harper, “Coleridge's Conversation Poems,” in M. H. Abrams, ed., English Romantic Poets Modern Essays in Criticism (New York, 1960), p. 147. Harper points out that Coleridge, like Wordsworth, used the devices of “Gaudyverse” in his early career. This debt is not, however, the important debt to Darwin.

17. See in particular John Livingston Lowes, The Road to Xanadu (New York, 1959), pp. 32 ff.

18. See Donald M. Hassler, “Coleridge, Darwin, and the Dome,” in The Serif, IV (September, 1967), 28-31.

19. See earlier in this book as well as Donald M. Hassler, “Erasmus Darwin's Comic Bathos,” in The Serif, VI, (June, 1969).

20. Elizabeth Schneider, Coleridge, Opium, and Kubla Khan (Chicago, 1953), p. 101. For Coleridge's version see Chapter XIV of Biographia Literia and his Shakespearean Criticism.

21. Darwin, Zoonomia, I, 206-7.

22. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literia, ed. J. Shawcross (Oxford, 1907), I, 108. See the next page (p. 109) for Coleridge's lapse into this very practice.

23. Peckham's article is the best definition and explanation of this variety of Romanticism. See Morse Peckham, “Toward a Theory of Romanticism,” in Publications of the Modern Language Association, LXVI (1951), 5-23.

24. See M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (New York, 1958), first published 1953, pp. 198-213.

25. Shelley, Adonais, 1. 462. Blake, who was much like Shelley in his visionary thought, did not use science as a rhetorical foundation for his Platonism; he used, among other things, a stricter biblical tradition. Thus, Blake had no reason to be indebted to Darwin and, in fact, deliberately stayed away from Darwin more than did any other Romantic. Perhaps this avoidance is partly due to the fact that Blake was hired by Joseph Johnson, Darwin's publisher, to provide some of the illustrations for Darwin's very fashionable poems when Blake himself was an unknown writer.

26. King-Hele, p. 151.

27. See Kenneth Neill Cameron, The Young Shelley, Genesis of a Radical (New York, 1962), first published 1950, pp. 281-84. The pioneering study of Shelley's indebtedness to Darwin, however, is Carl H. Grabo, A Newton Among Poets: Shelley's Use of Science in Prometheus Unbound (Chapel Hill, 1930). In my judgment, Grabo attributes too much emphasis on free will to Darwin; but his book does establish Shelley's familiarity with Darwin.

28. King-Hele writes on p. 148: “In the Cloud the Darwinian flavour is much stronger. Canto III of “The Economy of Vegetation” is largely concerned with clouds and water, and the shower scene (lines 509-36) seems like a preview of [it].”

29. Milton Wilson, Shelley's Later Poetry: A Study of His Prophetic Imagination (New York, 1959).

30. Prometheus Unbound, Act II, scene II, 11. 70-92.

31. Ibid., Act III, 11. 85-96 and 113-23.

32. “The Economy of Vegetation,” Canto IV, 1. 408.

33. R. H. Fogle, The Imagery of Keats and Shelley: A Comparative Study (Hamden, Conn., 1962), first published 1949, is the source of this well-known contrast.

34. Some critics tend to read Darwin as a Neoplatonic visionary in associating him with Shelley: “Electricity, for example, something mysterious, a coruscant blue and green flame, elusively and unpredictably spirit-like, was more to the mind of an Erasmus Darwin or a Shelley than the colorless mechanics which Addison had supposed to be reality.” W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., Philosophic Words (New Haven, 1948), p. 103.

35. Bernard Blackstone, The Consecrated Urn (London and New York, 1959), pp. 70-71. At the beginning of his book, Blackstone gives us an expressive image for Darwin's influence on all the Romantics: “I would like the reader to think of him [Darwin] as a churchyard yew, spreading his wide branches in storm and sunlight over the more remarkable writers who follow him; overshadowing them, dropping an occasional cone, so to speak, into the pools of their verse.” Blackstone, p. xiv.

36. Philip C. Ritterbush, The Art of Organic Forms (Washington, 1968), p. 19.

37. M. B. Forman, ed., The Letters of John Keats, 3rd edition (London, 1948), p. 7. To Charles Cowden Clarke, October 9, 1816.

38. See Alex Zwerdling, “The Mythographers and the Romantic Revival of Greek Myth,” in Publications of the Modern Language Association, LXXIX (1964), 447-56. Blackstone says “Keats's temple [in Hyperion] may owe something to Darwin's,” and then quotes from The Temple of Nature. Blackstone, p. 246.

39. Walter Jackson Bate, John Keats (Cambridge, 1964), p. 473.

40. The Temple of Nature, Canto II, 11. 299-304, and The Eve of St. Agnes, 11. 239-43.

41. King-Hele, p. 143.

42. Byron, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, 11. 894-96.

43. For this interpretation of Don Juan, I am indebted to W. H. Marshall, The Structure of Byron's Major Poems (Philadelphia, 1962). Unfortunately, Professor Marshall does not mention Darwin.

44. Robert D. Hume, “Gothic Versus Romantic: A Revaluation of the Gothic Novel,” in Publications of the Modern Language Association, 84 (March, 1969), 289.

45. The definitive biography of Byron contains only this: “Then on March 4 [1810] the English sloop-of-war, the Pylades, came into port at Piraeus. Captain Ferguson, accompanied by a tall young man, Dr. Francis Darwin, son of the author of The Botanic Garden, called and offered passage to Smyrna.” [Byron went.] Leslie A. Marchand, Byron, a Biography (New York, 1957), p. 231.

46. Loren Eiseley, Darwin's Century (New York, 1961), first published 1958, p. 352.