SOURCE: “The Temple of Nature,” in Erasmus Darwin, Macmillan & Co., Ltd., 1963, pp. 120-32.

In the following essay, King-Hele offers an assessment of The Temple of Nature, and states that the poem is evidence that Darwin, although a minor poet, deserves to hold a distinguished place among his eighteenth-century literary contemporaries.

In the mud of the Cambrian main           Did our earliest ancestor dive: From a shapeless albuminous grain           We mortals our being derive. 

Grant Allen, Ballade of Evolution

Darwin's last poem, The Temple of Nature; or The Origin of Society, is largely devoted to stating his evolutionary view of life. He follows the progress of life from its origin as microscopic specks in primeval seas to its present culmination in a civilized human society. The ideas propounded and argued in Zoonomia are presented as if they were historical facts, though Darwin admits in his preface that his aim ‘is...