- Contents
- Why a “Romantic” Natural History?
- Backgrounds: From Aristotle to Erasmus Darwin
- The Anxiety of Species: Toward a Romantic Natural History
- The Loves of Plants and Animals: Romantic Science and the Pleasures of Nature
- Additional Topics in Romantic Natural History
- Darwin’s Evolution: A New Gallery of Images
- A Romantic Natural History Timeline: 1750-1859
- Natural Historians
- Spencer F. Baird
- Henry David Thoreau
- Charles Darwin
- Louis Agassiz
- John D. Godman
- Adam Sedgwick
- Geoffray St. Hilaire
- William Smith
- Georges Cuvier
- Alexander von Humboldt
- Benjamin Rush
- Jean Lamarck
- William Paley
- Thomas Jefferson
- William Bartram
- Joseph Priestley
- Erasmus Darwin
- Oliver Goldsmith
- Gilbert White
- George-Louis Buffon
- Carolus Linnaeus
- Literary Figures
- Letitia Landon
- Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
- John Keats
- John Clare
- Felicia Hemans
- Percy Bysshe Shelley
- Lord Byron
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- William Wordsworth
- Ann Radcliffe
- Robert Burns
- William Blake
- Charlotte Smith
- Anna Laetitia Barbauld
- William Cowper
- Thomas Warton
- Christopher Smart
- Thomas Gray
- Thomas Beddoes
- James Thomson
- Alfred Lord Tennyson
- Robert Browning
- John Dyer
- Topics
- Temple of Nature (1803)
- Dorothy Wordsworth
- Fossils
- Geologist Poets
- Rhinos, Crocs and other Monsters
- Global Exploration
- Amphibious Thinking
- Poetry Lab with Dr. Frankenstein
- Galvani’s Electric Romanticism
- Frog Fish from Surinam
- Boundary between Plant and Animal
- Mimosa: The Sensitive Plant
- The Venus Fly Trap and the Great Chain of Being
- Humans as a species of Animal
- Monkeys, Men and Apes
- Jardine’s Natural History of Monkeys
- Human Monsters and Reproductive Mysteries
- Human Taxonomy
- Goldsmith’s History of Earth and Animated Nature
- Erasmus Darwin and the Frankenstein Mistake
- James King Davidson’s Journal
- Zoos as a 19th Century Spectacle
- Mammoths and Mastodons
- Fontana on the Venom of the Viper
- Celestial Bodies
- Coleridge on Plants and Animals
- Baird Report as Curator of Museum
- Artists & Illustrators
- Bibliography
- Tags
Robert Browning (1812-89)
Like Tennyson, Browning may not be the last of the Romantic poets, but he is alone among the early Victorians in his appreciation of the natural world in all of its richness, from the “yellowing fennel” (l. 12) and “Five beetles,–blind and green” (l. 17) of “Two in the Campagna” to the “grass . . . scant as hair” (l. 73) and “Toads in a poisoned tank” (l. 131) of “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.” The beauties of the natural world in Browning are often offset with an appreciation of the grotesque: “spider-web,” “mire,” and every “beast and creeping thing” (“Caliban Upon Setebos” (l. 45). Browning offers a fascinating examination of “natural theology” in his version of Shakespeare’s character Caliban from The Tempest, the monster, or perhaps we might say the “missing link,” who cannot imagine any divine force above him except in terms of the nature around him. This post-Darwinian meditation suggests that all conscious creatures, human beings included, may only be able to conceive of the rest of nature in terms of their own location in the grand scheme of things, Browning’s Victorian replacement for the Great Chain of Being. But the scheme of things is always contradictory in the world of evolution: one creature gobbles up another for no other reason than its own survival, countless creatures die so that a few can live only in order to reproduce.