SOURCE: “The Scientific Muse: The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin,” in Languages of Nature: Critical Essays on Science and Literature, edited by L. J. Jordanova, Rutgers University Press, 1986, pp. 159-203.

In the following essay, McNeil explores the historical and cultural background against which Darwin endeavored to combine science and poetry.

The second half of the eighteenth century witnessed a flourishing of provincial culture in Britain. Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), who, amongst other things, was a medical writer and practitioner, a poet, an inventor, and a theorist of education and agriculture, was a central figure in this blossoming. He was a founder of some of the provincial societies which were generating this activity: the Botanical Society of Lichfield, the Derby Philosophical Society, and the Lunar Society of Birmingham.

The Lunar Society was particularly important and has been described as ‘the chief intellectual driving force behind the Industrial Revolution’ (King-Hele, 1977, 13). This was...