Tag Archives: poetry
Backgrounds: From Aristotle to Erasmus Darwin
For the ancients, mythology suggested powerful interconnections among the natural, the human, and the imaginary. Gods were like humans, humans were like animals, animals were like plants, plants were like humans, and vice versa. Spontaneous generation, parthenogenesis by fire, impregnation … Continue reading
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Tagged Aristotle, astronomy, Charles Darwin, Erasmus Darwin, myth, 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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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
Anna Laetitia Barbauld
Anna [Aiken] Barbauld letter (Dickinson College Special Collections) Jennifer Lindbeck, Class of ’98, Dickinson College Anna Laetitia Aikin Barbauld (1743-1825) was born on June 20, 1743, in Leicestershire, England, the eldest daughter of John Aikin, a Dissenting clergyman and … Continue reading
Posted in Literary Figures
Tagged mouse, poetry, Priestley, women
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William Blake
William Blake is a particularly complex figure in terms of a romantic natural history. On the one hand, Blake was hostile to “vegetable” nature in all its forms. He saw the natural world as a sign of our “fallen” condition, … Continue reading
Posted in Literary Figures
Tagged art, painting, poetry, Romanticism, tiger
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William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth (1770-1850) is the Romantic poet most often described as a “nature” writer; what the word “nature” meant to Wordsworth is, however, a complex issue. On the one hand, Wordsworth was the quintessential poet as naturalist, always paying close … Continue reading
Lord Byron
George Gordon, Lord Byron may have referred to Erasmus Darwin as “that mighty master of unmeaning rhyme” (“English Bards and Scotch Reviewers” [1809]), but Byron’s poetry helped to construct a version of the natural world that affected readers throughout the … Continue reading
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822). The quote in the picture caption–at left: “I wish no living thing to suffer pain”–suggests precisely the shift embodied in the idea of Romantic natural history. The poet exhibited a fascination with natural phenomena from his early … Continue reading
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Tagged astronomy, chemistry, Frankenstein, poetry, science, Shelley
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John Clare
John Clare (1793-1864) is often considered to be the quintessential nature poet of the Romantic era. He was acclaimed as a “nature poet” from the time his first volume, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, appeared in 1820. Unlike Robert … Continue reading
Posted in Literary Figures
Tagged animals, natural history, plants, poetry
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John Keats
John Keats had as much sensitivity toward the natural world as any author of the period. From his earliest lyrical fragments and letters to the great odes of 1819, his writing consistently incorporates an astonishing number of natural images, as … Continue reading
Posted in Literary Figures
Tagged animals, bird, poetry, Romanticism, seasons
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