The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin

In his study of Erasmus Darwin’s major poetry, Priestman situates his literary works and Darwin himself within a network of other scientists, writers, thinkers and social movers and shakers. Positing a significant shift from the Enlightenment’s emphases on conceptual spaces to the Romantic period’s emphases on historical time, Priestman gives Darwin’s polymathic Enlightenment worldview and cognate poetics their due in a period when texts are too often judged by their adherence to a retrospectively constructed ’Romanticism’.