ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at poetic and philosophical observations of infancy by Coleridge and Erasmus Darwin. It reveals the ways in which the mother-infant dyad comes to be an especially powerful emblem for arguments about natural progress, development, and aesthetic taste. The chapter explores how these texts deploy mothers and babies as the privileged metaphor for the subject/object problem as well as for social relations more generally. It explores the importance of loss, complication, and distance to Coleridge. Articulated in the tension between aesthetic theory and poetic practice, these more ambivalent aesthetic feelings and forms remind people that they often see what they expect to see when they look at the child. These aesthetic theories first by juxtaposing them, and then by reading short passages of poems by Coleridge and Darwin. The poetry complicates the theory, revealing deep fissures in both writers' explanatory apparatuses, illuminating their limitations as well as their possibilities.
