ABSTRACT
This chapter devotes the idea that there was a British Enlightenment, of which Erasmus Darwin was not only a representative but a key figure. Several recent classical studies apply the term didactic epic to Lucretius De Rerum Natura, and Stuart Harris conflates Darwin's three big poems into a single Enlightenment Epic. A guide to Darwin's polymathic life and work is thus a guide to an artistic-scientific culture which is itself polymathic in outlook. A gentleman-lawyer, Erasmuss father Robert Darwin was introduced around 1720 to both the Spalding gentleman's Society in Lincolnshire and the Royal Society in London. The major poems underpinned by these prose works belong to the genre of didactic poetry, which went so completely out of fashion after Darwin that some general contextualization will be useful. Didactic means teaching or instructive, and the fact that this description fits key works by some of the greatest Latin poets, from Lucretius to Virgil and Horace.
