Darwin’s Bards: British and American Poetry in the Age of Evolution by John Holmes (review)

“I’m here as a product of [the] process of evolution, which doesn’t make very many exceptions,” said writer and political pundit Christopher Hitchens in an October 2010 interview, at the beginning of the long and very public process of his dying from esophageal cancer. Evolution “rates life relatively cheaply,” he pointed out. However, somewhat curiously, he also professed to be amazed that he had been allowed to live as long as he had: “I mean, most human beings who’ve ever been born would have been dead long before they reached my age....So to be relatively healthy at 62 is to be dealt a pretty good hand by the cosmos, which doesn’t know I’m here—and won’t notice when I’m gone” (All Things Considered. NPR 20 October 2010. Radio). Note the contradiction, which “the Hitch,” uncharacteristically, let slip by: if the cosmos doesn’t know he’s here, why even assume that it plays with him? The universe is not obligated to us, as Stephen Crane said in 1899, but wouldn’t it be pretty to think it just might? And if we don’t matter much, to paraphrase a line from Thomas Hardy’s “At Castle Boterel” (1914), wouldn’t it be nice to think, too, that our poetry does, even if only a little bit?

This paradox shapes many of the poems collected for scrutiny in John Holmes’s Darwin’s Bards, a book that has engaged and excited me more than any other academic publication last year. Holmes is not interested in the many verse portraits of Charles Darwin’s life that have been published over the last few decades, from Lorine Niedecker’s posthumously published “Darwin” (2002) to the recent cycle, Darwin—A Life in Poems (2009), written by Darwin’s great-great-granddaughter Ruth Padel, or the even more recent collaborative effort by several songwriters called Darwin Song Project (2009). Instead, Holmes focuses on poems that, often without explicitly referencing Darwin, confront head on the existential dilemmas caused by the Darwinian revolution and try to make sense of the chilling realization that, in a line from George Meredith’s Modern Love (1862), nature “goes by / Scarce any retrospection in her eye” (qtd. in Holmes 204). Holmes supplies a vast archive of Darwinian poems for our benefit, and the reader is bound to make some unexpected discoveries along the way, such as the forgotten late-Victorian comic poet Constance Naden’s work or, closer to our time, Neill Rollinson’s very funny “My Father Shaving Charles Darwin” (1999). But the real protagonists of Holmes’s book are Hardy and Meredith. For the sort of formalist analysis which is Holmes’s particular strength, their poetry is richer, more interesting, and also more rewarding than that of most of the other writers here assembled.

Holmes’s premise is that his Darwinian poems are “still pertinent to our understanding of the Darwinian condition” (5), and he exemplifies this in chapters dealing with the grandest of all topics: God, death, sex, and the human place in the universe. But where Holmes finds his poets fruitfully altering our perspective on Darwinism, I see most of them anxiously trying to tuck in what they tremblingly realized Darwin’s theory had permanently undone: the confidence that all the facts of nature are also, as Ralph Waldo Emerson had still so fervently believed, spiritual facts.

Holmes mentions only in passing that Darwin was a consummate writer himself, more willing than Holmes’s poets to shape his sentences to reflect the radicalism of his insights. In his autobiography, written late in life, Darwin declared that for many years he had not been able to endure a line of poetry and that even Shakespeare nauseated him. Some have assumed that Darwin was not quite serious when he wrote this, especially since he went on to specify that his taste...