Tag Archives: evolution
B. Ashton Nichols
PUBLICATIONS: BOOKS: As Author: Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism: Toward Urbanatural Roosting (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), part of the Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters series. Series Editor, Marilyn Gaull. Nominated for the John Burroughs Medal and the American Publishers Prose Prize (a … Continue reading
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Tagged Ashton Nichols, Charles Darwin, evolution, natural history, poetry, prose, Romanticism, science
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Monkeys, Men, and Man-Apes
Depictions of monkey’s and apes in natural histories by Buffon , Jardine, Goldsmith (and others) led to confusion and anxiety on the part of natural historians and the general public. Long before Darwin and Mendel, similarities between simians and humans … Continue reading
Temple of Nature (1803)
Frontispiece from Erasmus Darwin’s The Temple of Nature (1803). The image suggests the goddess of poetry pulling aside the veil to reveal the many-breasted Artemis of Ephesus, goddess of wild nature. Anthropologists have recently claimed that Artemis’s chest was … Continue reading
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Tagged Erasmus Darwin, evolution, poetry, science
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Erasmus Darwin
Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles Darwin, was born near Nottingham on December 12, 1731. He was educated at Cambridge and Edinburgh and settled first near Lichfield and later at Derby. A remarkable polymath, he became a best selling poet during … Continue reading
Posted in Natural Historians
Tagged Erasmus Darwin, evolution, Frankenstein, plants, poetry, science, sexuality
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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
Posted in Natural Historians
Tagged Charles Darwin, Erasmus Darwin, evolution, science
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Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Tennyson (1809-1892) is not the last Romantic, but he is the last poet of the nineteenth-century to fully capture, in his early poems, the lyrical spirit of his great predecessors. An early poem like “Timbuctoo” echoes the naturalistic cadences of … Continue reading
Posted in Literary Figures
Tagged Charles Darwin, evolution, poetry, science, Victorian
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