SOURCE: “Disenchanted Darwinians: Wordsworth, Coleridge and Blake,” in Wordsworth Circle, Vol. 25, No. 2, Spring, 1994, pp. 114-18.

In the following essay, delivered at the Wordsworth Summer Conference in the U.K. in 1993, King-Hele argues that Darwin's poetic style and scientific convictions significantly influenced the works of the major writers of the Romantic era—namely Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and Blake.

I have to begin with something that should be well known but is not, namely that Erasmus Darwin was regarded as the greatest English poet of the time when Wordsworth and Coleridge were in their early twenties. Darwin gained this high reputation after the publication of his poem The Botanic Garden, which appeared in two parts, one in 1789 (The Loves of the Plants) and the other in 1792 (called The Economy of Vegetation). His fame was at its peak between 1792 and 1794, with a slow decline between 1795 and 1798, and then an abrupt...