ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the decisive moves in the direction taken by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, and the way in which these moves were partly focused by way of an ongoing combative dialogue with Erasmus Darwin's work. It talks about the danger of putting all tremendous and radical poetry of the 1790s under the heading of Romanticism by beginning with the very different case of Darwin's many direct parallels and intersections with William Blake. William Blake's inexorable absorption into the big six canon of Romantic poets means that his importance for understanding the kind of Enlightenment aesthetic the author have been linking to Darwin is in danger of being obscured. One reason for Wordsworth's inability to complete Coleridge's plan for him may have been that he still had at least half a foot in the materialist camp.
