Tag Archives: poetry

* * * * * * * * Reviews of Works by Ashton Nichols * * * * * * * * *

  Wednesday, July 20, 2011 Technology NEWS WATCH; Views of Nature Before Darwin Jumped Into the Debate By SHELLY FREIERMAN Published: New York Times, September 21, 2000: front page “Circuits” section, Thursday       A Romantic Natural History, maintained … Continue reading

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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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Bibliography

[Click to go to each letter of the alphabet] a–b–c–d–e–f–g–h–i–j–k–l–m–n–o–p–q–r–s–t–u–v–w–x–y–z . . . . . .A Romantic Natural History          Bibliography (Updated: 327 entries as of 9/2013) A Abernethy, John. An Enquiry into the Probability and Rationality … Continue reading

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In the Poetry Lab with Dr. Frankenstein

Science and literature. They don’t have anything to do with each other, do they. Science: that’s heavyweight; that’s for rationalists, clear thinkers with a graphing calculator and the scientific method. Literature: that’s lightweight; that’s for idealists, romantic dreamers with stars … Continue reading

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Geologist-Poets

Once the hammers of geologists began turning up startlingly clear fossils like the one shown here, it became much harder for scientists, naturalists, and the general public to sustain the idea of a neatly organized creation that had popped up … Continue reading

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Dorothy Wordsworth

Dorothy Wordsworth (1751-1855) was an engaged and engaging naturalist in her own right. Here she describes the spring flowers that would become the subject for perhaps her brother William‘s most famous poem: “When we were in the woods beyond Gowbarrow … Continue reading

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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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A Romantic Natural History Timeline: 1750-1859

1750: Thomas Gray, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”; Johann Tobias Mayer, Map of the Moon 1751: Linnaeus, Philosophia Botanica 1752: Thomas Chatterton b. (d.1770); Benjamin Franklin invents lightning conductor 1753: Linnaeus, Species Plantorum; charter granted to British Museum 1755: … Continue reading

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The Loves of Plants and Animals: Romantic Science and the Pleasures of Nature

[first published in “Romanticism and Ecology,” Romantic Circles Praxis Series (November 2001) [O]ur intellectual sympathies [rest] with . . . the miseries, or with the joys, of our fellow creatures. – Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia (1794) When Wordsworth notes his faith … Continue reading

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The Anxiety of Species: Toward a Romantic Natural History

[first published in The Wordsworth Circle 28:3 (1997): 130-36] We sometimes think that the concept of mutable species burst on the world like a thunderclap with the 1859 publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species. So great was Darwin’s own … Continue reading

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