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Darwin's Bards: British and American Poetry in the Age of Evolution
Darwin's Bards is the first comprehensive study of how poets have responded to the ideas of Charles Darwin in over fifty years. John Holmes argues that poetry can have a profound impact on how we think and feel about the Darwinian condition. Is a Darwinian universe necessarily a godless one? If not, what might Darwinism tell us about the nature of God? Is Darwinism compatible with immortality, and if not, how can we face our own deaths or the loss of those we love? What is our own place in the Darwinian universe, and our ecological role here on earth? How does our kinship with other animals affect how we see them? How does the fact that we are animals ourselves alter how we think about our own desires, love and sexual morality? All told, is life in a Darwinian universe grounds for celebration or despair? Holmes explores the ways in which some of the most perceptive and powerful British and American poets of the last hundred-and-fifty years have grappled with these questions, from Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning and Thomas Hardy, through Robert Frost and Edna St Vincent Millay, to Ted Hughes, Thom Gunn, Amy Clampitt and Edwin Morgan. Reading their poetry, we too can experience what it can mean to live in a Darwinian world. Written in an accessible and engaging style, and aimed at scientists, theologians, philosophers and ecologists as well as poets, critics and students of literature, Darwin's Bards is a timely intervention into the heated debates over Darwin's legacy for religion, ecology and the arts.
304 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2009
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February 13, 2025
I came upon “Darwin’s Bards” via another book, “Natural Magic” by Renee Bergland, which made a case for a connection between Emily Dickinson and Charles Darwin. As tenuous as Bergland’s connection is, Darwin’s impact on a range of fields of human endeavor…artistic, philosophical, psychological, biological, ecological, theological…cannot be…overlooked. What WAS Darwin’s impact on all these fields, especially poetry?
Poetry. That is the theme of this book, and it manages to touch upon those other areas more or less.
Not being a ‘poetry person’, I did find it valuable to approach the works discussed through a specific lens. It’s always better to have an idea of what you’re looking for than to just hope to figure it out. Think of Beatrice and Vergil. What would he have been without a guide?
And, accepting that Darwin’s thought did have a profound impact, it’s helpful to have a guide generally through the thicket of 19th and 20th century poetry. It’s helpful to know that there are pre-Darwinian currents of thought (Lamarck) that influenced others (Tennyson) before ‘Origin of Species’ (1859). George Meredith is a later Victorian poet whose name I’d never have known but for this book, and he seems quite worthy. I always appreciate a book that leads me on to other stuff.
However…one can’t help but suspect that at a certain point, the author’s interest in his topic is eclipsed by his desire to promote some of the fashionable ideologies of the day. The link between Darwin and the religions of ecology, of Native American spirituality, of animals having the same rights as people, is plausible, but it’s a stretch.
Indeed, that the trajectory of American/English poetry should pass from Tennyson through Hardy and Meredith to Thomas Gunn, who died of “polysubstance abuse”, (“the only poet to have written a halfway decent quintain while on LSD”), says something unflattering about the road taken by modern poetry. I find it impossible to accept that the most-highly evolved example of English-language poetry should be found in the drug-addled self-centered vanity of the 60s metastasized into the AIDS holocaust of 1980s San Francisco. Thomas Gunn’s and Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s and Allen Ginsberg’s poetry are, obviously, aesthetically and spiritually a dead end. From the grandeur of Tennyson to the self-absorbed homo-eroticism of Gunn could not have been the result of blind chance, natural selection, or survival of the fittest; it necessarily was the product of the very non-divine ‘intelligent design’ of ‘authorities’ like Holmes.
Further, ANYONE who presents the Kinsey Report as worthy of intellectual respect, as does Holmes, clearly has chosen to ignore the evidence of the corruption underlying Kinsey’s fundamentally dishonest if not criminal myth-mongering. For all this book’s valuable insights and analyses, this fact alone renders “Darwin’s Bards” abominable. Kinsey was the devil, and Holmes embraces him with loving abandon.
One might even suspect that Holmes has an agenda, one that has little to do with poetry.
As a final comment…and I know Flannery O’Connor was not a “poet”…but I’m inclined to think that…everything that rises probably does NOT converge (the opposite seems more probable)…but how can one fail to mention, if only in the bibliography, Teilhard de Chardin and Flannery O’Connor?
Two thumbs down.
Poetry. That is the theme of this book, and it manages to touch upon those other areas more or less.
Not being a ‘poetry person’, I did find it valuable to approach the works discussed through a specific lens. It’s always better to have an idea of what you’re looking for than to just hope to figure it out. Think of Beatrice and Vergil. What would he have been without a guide?
And, accepting that Darwin’s thought did have a profound impact, it’s helpful to have a guide generally through the thicket of 19th and 20th century poetry. It’s helpful to know that there are pre-Darwinian currents of thought (Lamarck) that influenced others (Tennyson) before ‘Origin of Species’ (1859). George Meredith is a later Victorian poet whose name I’d never have known but for this book, and he seems quite worthy. I always appreciate a book that leads me on to other stuff.
However…one can’t help but suspect that at a certain point, the author’s interest in his topic is eclipsed by his desire to promote some of the fashionable ideologies of the day. The link between Darwin and the religions of ecology, of Native American spirituality, of animals having the same rights as people, is plausible, but it’s a stretch.
Indeed, that the trajectory of American/English poetry should pass from Tennyson through Hardy and Meredith to Thomas Gunn, who died of “polysubstance abuse”, (“the only poet to have written a halfway decent quintain while on LSD”), says something unflattering about the road taken by modern poetry. I find it impossible to accept that the most-highly evolved example of English-language poetry should be found in the drug-addled self-centered vanity of the 60s metastasized into the AIDS holocaust of 1980s San Francisco. Thomas Gunn’s and Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s and Allen Ginsberg’s poetry are, obviously, aesthetically and spiritually a dead end. From the grandeur of Tennyson to the self-absorbed homo-eroticism of Gunn could not have been the result of blind chance, natural selection, or survival of the fittest; it necessarily was the product of the very non-divine ‘intelligent design’ of ‘authorities’ like Holmes.
Further, ANYONE who presents the Kinsey Report as worthy of intellectual respect, as does Holmes, clearly has chosen to ignore the evidence of the corruption underlying Kinsey’s fundamentally dishonest if not criminal myth-mongering. For all this book’s valuable insights and analyses, this fact alone renders “Darwin’s Bards” abominable. Kinsey was the devil, and Holmes embraces him with loving abandon.
One might even suspect that Holmes has an agenda, one that has little to do with poetry.
As a final comment…and I know Flannery O’Connor was not a “poet”…but I’m inclined to think that…everything that rises probably does NOT converge (the opposite seems more probable)…but how can one fail to mention, if only in the bibliography, Teilhard de Chardin and Flannery O’Connor?
Two thumbs down.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Displaying 1 of 1 review