The poem was highly praised, and for a few years Darwin was regarded as the leading English poet of the day. But he had turned away from verse to complete a massive treatise on animal life,
Zoonomia (1794-1796), where he expounded his system of medicine and also his concept of biological evolution (as we now call it), later redeveloped much more fully by his grandson Charles. Next came a lengthy volume on plant life,
Phytologia (1800), and his second (and better) long poem,
The Temple of Nature (1803), where he traced the evolution of life from microscopic specks to the human animal. The Romantic poets liked Darwin's integrated view of nature and humankind, respected his scientific authority, and were impressed by the popular success of
The Botanic Garden . He had much influence, both verbally and intellectually, on William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and (to a lesser extent) John Keats.
The son of Robert and Elizabeth Hill Darwin, Erasmus Darwin was born in 1731 in central England, at the village of Elston, near Newark in Nottinghamshire. His father was a lawyer who had retired early, and Erasmus was the youngest of his seven children.
This is a free page. This page contains 193 words. This
biography contains 3,329 words (approx. 11 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Biography with our Erasmus Darwin Access Pass.
