ABSTRACT

This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book explores to understand the Enlightenment assumptions behind Erasmus Darwin's poetry, without a priori recourse to the distorting lens of post-Romantic criteria. In the eighteenth century, plenty of other didactic poems work their way through particular topics, from the Newtonian arrangement of the cosmos to the production of cider or wool or the pleasures of the imagination. The book explains that there is nothing knee-jerk or automatic in any of the technical features: each of Darwin's forms aims to do something completely different, or at least to open out the diverse facts of the universe in a newly witty and inventive. Darwin's poems lead people to what he called the vestibule of a quite astonishing range of thought and knowledge: both that of his own day and sometimes particularly in Temples very well-founded evolutionism of their own.