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The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin
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The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

Enlightened Spaces, Romantic Times

The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

Enlightened Spaces, Romantic Times

ByMartin Priestman
Edition 1st Edition
First Published 2013
eBook Published 24 February 2016
Pub. location London
Imprint Routledge
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.4324/9781315554556
Pages 324 pages
eBook ISBN 9781315554556
SubjectsLanguage & Literature
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Priestman, M. (2013). The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin. London: Routledge, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315554556

While historians of science have focused significant attention on Erasmus Darwin’s scientific ideas and milieu, relatively little attention has been paid to Darwin as a literary writer. In The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin: Enlightened Spaces, Romantic Times, Martin Priestman situates Darwin’s three major poems - The Loves of the Plants (1789), The Economy of Vegetation (1791) and The Temple of Nature (1803) - and Darwin himself within a large, polymathic late-Enlightenment network of other scientists, writers, thinkers and social movers and shakers. Interpreting Darwin’s poetry in terms of Darwin’s broader sense of the poetic text as a material space, he posits a significant shift from the Enlightenment’s emphases on conceptual spaces to the Romantic period’s emphases on historical time. He shows how Darwin’s poetry illuminates his stance toward all the major physical sciences and his well-formulated theories of evolution and materially based psychology. Priestman’s study also offers the first substantial accounts of Darwin’s mythological theories and their links to Enlightenment Rosicrucianism and Freemansonry, and of the reading of history that emerges from the fragment-poem The Progress of Society, a first-ever printed edition of which is included in an appendix. Ultimately, Priestman’s book offers readers a sustained account of Darwin’s polymathic Enlightenment worldview and cognate poetics in a period when texts are too often judged by their adherence to a retrospectively constructed ’Romanticism’.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
chapter |8 pages
Introduction
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chapter 1|20 pages
Dr Darwin, the Everything
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chapter 2|16 pages
Enlightened Spaces: Darwin’s Visual Poetics
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chapter 3|24 pages
Texts and Gardens
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chapter 4|24 pages
Plants
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chapter 5|10 pages
Machinery
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chapter 6|20 pages
Matter (1): Evolution
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chapter 7|16 pages
Matter (2): Bodies and Minds
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chapter 8|30 pages
Myths
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chapter 9|24 pages
Aesthetics, Sex, Myths and History: Darwin and
ByRichard Payne Knight
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chapter 10|24 pages
Politics
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chapter 11|22 pages
Romantic Times (1): Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth
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chapter 12|18 pages
Romantic Times (2): Later Romantics and Women Poets
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