Abstract
In 1789, the following review of a recent work of poetry appeared in the Analytical Review, the progressive periodical issued by radical publisher Joseph Johnson:
The poetry itself is of a very superior cast, and whether we consider the author’s management of his subject, his delicacy of expression, or the sweetness of his numbers, we feel ourselves equally called upon to commend him. He introduces his various objects of description … with so much versatility of genius, that we could not but admire the grace and ease, and the playfulness of fancy with which he conducts himself through this part of his business, perhaps the most difficult of all. His descriptions themselves are luminous as language selected with the finest taste can make them, and meet the eye with a boldness of projection unattainable by any hand but that of a master.
The reviewer goes on to praise the ‘continued series of fictions’ which enhance the ‘beauty’ of the poem, before, after a series of extended extracts from the work, concluding the review by hailing the author as a ‘true poet’.1 The reviewer was the poet William Cowper, the author was the provincial doctor and Lunar Society experimenter Erasmus Darwin, and the work itself was The Loves of the Plants, part of a larger work, The Botanic Garden, which would appear in complete form three years later.
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Notes
Analytical Review (May 1789), repr. in The Letters and Prose Writings of William Cowper, ed. James King and Charles Ryskamp, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), vol. 5, pp. 90–9 (pp. 91, 98.)
Analytical Review (March 1793), repr. in Letters and Prose Writings, ed. King and Ryskamp, vol. 5, pp. 100–8 (p. 106). ‘Verbosum curiosa felicitas’ is ‘the studied felicity of words’.
For context and an early draft, see Cowper’s letter to William Hayley, June 1792, in Letters and Prose Writings, ed. King and Ryskamp, vol. 4, pp. 106–8.
See Desmond King-Hele, Erasmus Darwin: A Life of Unequalled Achievement (London: De la Mare, 1999), pp. 237–8.
For detailed discussion of the reception of Darwin, see Norton Garfinkle, ‘Science and Religion in England, 1790–1800: The Critical Response to the Work of Erasmus Darwin’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 16:3 (1955), 376–88, and Julia List, ‘Erasmus Darwin’s Beautification of the Sublime: Materialism, Religion and the Reception of The Economy of Vegetation in the Early 1790s’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 32:3 (2009), 389–405.
Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia; or, the Laws of Organic Life, 2 vols (London, 1794–96), vol. 1, pp. 1–2; emphasis as in the original.
George Campbell, The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776, repr. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1963), pp. 73, 75, 53.
Thomas Reid, An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense (1764), in The Works of Thomas Reid, ed. William Hamilton, 2 vols (Edinburgh, 1863, repr. Bristol: Thoemmes, 1994), I, p. 201.
Monthly Review, 43:2 (February 1804), 113–27 (pp. 124–5); Edinburgh Review, II (July 1803), 491–506 (pp. 498–9). For the Edinburgh Review’s political orientation, see Philip Connell, Romanticism, Economics and the Question of ‘Culture’ (Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 93ff.
See ‘The Futility of Criticism’, Weekly Magazine, 3 (12 January 1760), in Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Arthur Friedman, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), III, pp. 51–3 (p. 53); ‘On Poetry, as Distinguished from Other Writing’, in The Works of Oliver Goldsmith, 4 vols (London: George Bell, 1892), I, p. 357.
See Joseph Addison, ‘An Essay on Virgil’s Georgics’, in Eighteenth-Century Critical Essays, ed. Scott Elledge, 2 vols (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1961), I, pp. 1–8 (p. 2).
Anna Seward, Memoirs of the Life of Dr. Darwin (Philadelphia, 1804), pp. 94–5. For women and botanical writing in the late eighteenth century, see Samantha George, Botany, Sexuality, and Women’s Writing, 1760–1830 (Manchester University Press, 2007).
Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden, containing The Loves of the Plants (London, 1789), pp. 132, vi, 83, 40.
According to Philip Connell, an established opposition between ‘literature, aesthetics, and feeling, on the one hand; and science, utility and reason’ was to become intransigent by the late 1820s. See Romanticism, Economics and the Question of ‘Culture’, p. 11. For the argument that Wordsworth’s ‘Preface’ was a response to the claims made for science by Humphry Davy in his Royal Institution Lectures, see Roger Sharrock, ‘The Chemist and the Poet; Sir Humphry Davy and the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 17 (1962), pp. 57–76.
On Priestley, Bentham, and the social and political agenda of radical philosophy from the 1770s, see Simon Schaffer, ‘States of Mind: Enlightenment and Natural Philosophy’, in The Languages of Psyche, ed. G. S. Rousseau (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). On Beddoes, see also Lawrence, ‘The Power and the Glory’, and Brian Dolan, ‘Conservative Politicians, Radical Philosophers, and the Aerial Remedy for the Diseases of Civilisation’, History of the Human Sciences, 15:2 (2002), 35–54.
Anon., The Golden Age: A Poetical Epistle (London, 1794), footnote, p. 6.
For French chemists’ participation in revolutionary activities, such as the collection of saltpetre for gunpowder, as well as Burke’s influential hostility to chemistry, see Maurice Crosland, ‘The Image of Science as a Threat: Burke versus Priestley and the “Philosophic Revolution”’, British Journal for the History of Science, 20 (1987), 277–307 (pp. 285–7).
Thomas Mathias, The Pursuits of Literature, or What You Will: A Satirical Poem in Dialogue (part 1) (London, 1794), pp. 14–15.
See for instance Markman Ellis’ discussion in The Politics of Sensibility (Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 192–7.
The phrase ‘creative anthology’ is Marcus Wood’s: see Radical Satire and Print Culture, 1790–1822 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 88.
Pig’s Meat, 2 vols (London, 1795), vol. 2, p. 124; vol. 1, p. 33.
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© 2012 Catherine Packham
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Packham, C. (2012). Animated Nature: Erasmus Darwin and the Poetry and Politics of Vital Matter, 1789–1803. In: Eighteenth-Century Vitalism. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230368392_6
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