Monthly Archives: June 2011
Adam Sedgwick (1785-1873)
I cannot promise to teach you all geology, I can only fire your imaginations. –a comment from Sedgwick’s lecture notes Adam Sedgwick was a Cambridge-educated geologist who reshaped the study of this science by emphasizing research on rock strata and … Continue reading
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John D. Godman (1794-1830)
From A Memoir of . . . Dr. John D. Godman (Philadelphia, 1859): [His] essays are not inferior in poetical beauty, and vivid and accurate description, to the celebrated letters of Gilbert White on the natural history of Selbourne. He came … Continue reading
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Louis Agassiz (1807-73)
I have devoted my whole life to the study of Nature, and yet a single sentence may express all that I have done. I have shown that there is a correspondence between the succession of Fishes in geological times and … Continue reading
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Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin was perhaps the naturalist most responsible for altering humanity’s view of nature (and human nature) over the past two centuries. Darwin’s main idea was not new, nor was it complete, but his belief that species evolved over time … Continue reading
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Tagged Charles Darwin, Erasmus Darwin, evolution, science
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Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau’s Walden is the ur-text of American nature writing. Many earlier American explorers, naturalists, and authors had described the natural wonders of the new continent, but until Thoreau, no author had located “nature” at the center of one vision of … Continue reading
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Tagged America, natural history, nature writing, prose
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Spencer F. Baird
Jennifer Lindbeck, Class of ’98 Dickinson College, and Ashton Nichols, Department of English Spencer Fullerton Baird was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1823. He attended West Nottingham Academy near Port Deposit, Maryland. He entered Dickinson College at the age … Continue reading
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John Dyer
John Dyer was a Welsh painter and poet who is often seen as a naturalistic forerunner of Wordsworth. Although primarily known for one loco-descriptive poem, “Grongar Hill,” he is important for the careful and acurate observation evident throughout his works … Continue reading
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James Thomson
James Thomson (1700-1748) was perhaps the eighteenth-century author most responsible for the tradition we now think of as “nature poetry” in British literature. His long poems, particularly The Seasons and The Castle of Indolence had an incalculable influence on the … Continue reading
Thomas Gray
Thomas Gray is another forerunners of the Romantic movement in British literature. Although much of his poetry fits well into the conventions of 18th-century English verse, his sense of specific places, his emphasis on the picturesque, his naturalistic observations, and … Continue reading
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Christopher Smart
Christopher Smart (a.k.a. Jack, Kit and Kitty Smart) was a legendary “mad” poet, although his madness was the highly suspect result of tensions within his family, between Smart and his father-in-law, a jealous publisher who imprisoned Smart in an asylum … Continue reading
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