SOURCE: “Influence of a Comic Materialist on the Romantics,” in Erasmus Darwin, Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1973, pp. 95-113.

In the following essay, Hassler argues that the major literary figures of the Romantic movement—Wordsworth, Shelley, Coleridge, Keats, and Byron—were influenced considerably by Darwin's writings, as they reacted to his scientific ideas, his tone of comic defense, and his use of language.

Men must endure Their going hence, even as their coming hither: Ripeness is all. 

—William Shakespeare, King Lear

To endure the triumph of life and to settle for only that is very difficult for bumptious man to do. Most of the brilliant Romantic poets who were growing to maturity when Darwin was publishing his works refused to accept the triumph of life and used all of their inventiveness to redefine human nature sufficiently so that life, as science was revealing it, would not triumph. Darwin's pagan or...