IDNStudy.com, kung saan ang mga eksperto ay sumasagot sa iyong mga tanong. Makakuha ng hakbang-hakbang na mga gabay para sa lahat ng iyong teknikal na tanong mula sa mga miyembro ng aming komunidad na may kaalaman.
Sagot :
Answer:
Though he died before his grandson Charles was even born, Erasmus Darwin anticipated the theory of evolution through natural selection, albeit in poetic form. In his posthumously published The Temple of Nature (1803), he writes of how:
Organic life beneath the shoreless waves
Was born and nurs’d in Ocean’s pearly caves;
First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,
Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;
These, as successive generations bloom,
New powers acquire, and larger limbs assume;
Whence countless groups of vegetation spring,
And breathing realms of fin and feet and wing.
This verse demonstrates the prescience of the imaginative arts, how poetic dreams can foreshadow empirical reality. Fair to admit that Erasmus’s contributions lacked the specificity of his grandson, and that evolutionary thinking goes back to antiquity, but this was a novel way to anticipate natural selection. Poetry has unrealised potential, not just in celebrating and describing nature, but also as an integral way of thinking about nature.
In The Genius of Erasmus Darwin (2005), C U M Smith and Robert Arnott describe the physician, naturalist and poet as ‘the English Leonardo’. Yet this Darwin often merits simply a footnote in his grandson’s biography. In The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin: Enlightened Spaces, Romantic Times (2013), Martin Priestman quips that ‘few writers can be so burdened with a surname which so clearly belongs to someone else’. While the younger Darwin provided the scientific mechanism for evolution – and a cursory reading of On the Origin of Species (1859) demonstrates that he was an adept stylist – his grandfather did accomplish something exemplary. Charles enumerated the details of evolution, but Erasmus anticipated its broad outlines; the younger Darwin wrote in prose, and the elder imagined in poetry, arguably the most significant scribbler of scientific verse in English, a sadly neglected genre.
Erasmus Darwin’s reputation rested on his biological text Zoonomia (1794-96), his radical politics, which encompassed abolitionism and women’s suffrage, and his poetry in The Botanic Garden (1791), where he popularised Carl Linnaeus’s system of biological classification, doing for him what Alexander Pope did for Isaac Newton. But The Temple of Nature, an epic about the history of the Universe, was his masterpiece. Desmond King-Hele, whose biography Erasmus Darwin: A Life of Unequalled Achievement (1999) remains the standard, claims that his was the ‘greatest imaginative construct in the history of the world, because he was the first person to arrive at and fully express and expound a nearly correct view of the development of life on Earth’.
The Temple of Nature is prophetic, depicting a Big Bang billions of years ago, and organic life arising from a primordial soup, pushed forward through a process that is regulated by ‘war, and pestilence, disease, and dearth’ that ‘Sweep the superfluous myriads from the earth.’ Both of Darwin’s long poems were written with the aim ‘to enlist imagination under the banner of science’, making him ‘one of the only poets to take science as his subject matter’, as Smith and Arnott explain. It is an error, however, to read Darwin’s poetry as simply an exercise in the doggerel of popularisation. The scholar Stuart Harris notes that Darwin plumbed the ‘common ground between poetry and science’. In epics such as The Temple of Nature, it’s more accurate to say with Smith and Arnott that empiricism and verse approach the ‘condition of unit: and through it the poetry is expressive of genuine contemporary science As with the 17th-century philosopher Francis Bacon, Darwin was an indefatigable advocate for the scientific method.
King-Hele emphasises that ‘Darwin was recognised everywhere as the leading English poet of the day’, a figure who nearly became poet laureate. Not until the 20th century did historians recognise how significant Darwin was during his own period. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who despised Darwin’s poetry, still referred to him as the ‘first literary character in Europe, and the most original-minded Man’, while for the gothic novelist Horace Walpole the verse was ‘all, all, the most lovely poetry’.
Explanation:
pa brainlist po god bless
Salamat sa iyong presensya. Magpatuloy sa pagtatanong at pagbabahagi ng iyong nalalaman. Sama-sama tayong lumikha ng isang mas matibay na samahan. Salamat sa pagpili sa IDNStudy.com. Umaasa kami na makita ka ulit para sa mas maraming solusyon.
