The Intuitions of Analogy in Erasmus Darwin’s Poetics

Erasmus Darwin’s Botanic Garden (1789–91) notoriously synthesizes scientific knowledge, poetry, and radical politics. The poem illustrates Darwin’s theorization of analogy in Zoonomia (1794–96) as a complex mental faculty that underwrites the coherence of experience and sensation. This facultative analogy is Darwin’s answer to empirical skepticism, and it forces a critical reevaluation of his poetics, one that situates The Botanic Garden squarely within the tradition of Romantic naturalism and indicates his influence upon nineteenth-century comparative history and science.