Tag Archives: Shelley

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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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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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

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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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Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851) was the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, the wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the author of one of the most widely read and often redacted novels of the past two centuries. Frankenstein; or, … Continue reading

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