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127 The reception of Darwinism has proven to be a treasure trove for anyone interested in the dynamics of exchange between the natural sciences and literary culture. Darwinism not only instigated a paradigm shift in the natural sciences, but also has exerted a tremendous influence on the literary imagination since it began to migrate from its scientific habitat to other cultural areas. For the past 150 years, evolutionary theory has been claimed and rejected in the context of such diverse cultural projects as naturalism, Social Darwinism, pragmatism, creationism , and posthumanism. In the United States it continues to this day to be the subject of heated debates and legal battles. Many Americans still prefer creationist beliefs to Darwinian theory. This essay traces some of the multifaceted philosophical and literary responses to evolutionary theory. I explore how U.S. writers in the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth responded to Darwin’s model of evolutionary change. My argument unfolds in the three stages indicated by the subtitle of the essay. First, I outline the cultural and religious significance that Darwin’s contemporaries attributed to evolutionary theory. I briefly consider how naturalist and natural history writers at the turn of the century reacted to the dissolution of pre-Darwinian certainties. In the second step, I examine the pragmatist appropriation of Darwinism by the American philosopher John Dewey. Dewey drew on evolutionary logic to argue that such different cultures of knowledge as science, philosophy, and literature share a common purpose: they advance the development of human potential by expanding our capacity for reciprocal interactions with one another and our environment. To help us negotiate the demands of the situations we encounter, Dewey reasoned, our different ways of understanding have to converge in an experiential mode of knowledge that is at the same time specific, provisional, and relational. Such an integrative form of knowledge, he h e i k e s c h a e f e r “A World Which Is Not All In, and Never Will Be” Darwinism, Pragmatist Thinking, and Modernist Poetry 128 Heike Schaefer insisted, would offer us the best possibility for individual development and help to transform American society into a participatory democracy. Dewey’s experiential concept of scientific inquiry and aesthetic expression, then, provides the framework for my analysis of modernist poetry in the third part of this essay. I read the poetry of Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams through the lens of pragmatist evolutionary thinking to bring the processual and relational logic of their poems into focus. The poems foreground processes of perception and signification to explore how different modes of seeing and saying affect our capacity to participate in the world. They bear out Dewey’s conviction that a fusion of the literary and scientific imagination carries the potential for cultural innovation. “Only imaginative vision,” he reminds us in Art as Experience (1934), “elicits the possibilities that are interwoven within the texture of the actual.” t h e r e c e p t i o n o f d a r w i n i s m i n t h e u n i t e d s t at e s When Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859 and The Descent of Man in 1871, he offered a scientific theory that profoundly changed how people thought not only about nature but about themselves and their place in the world. Darwin offered a systematic explanation about how life forms had evolved and continued to develop. He argued that speciation, the development of life into distinct species of increasingly complex organisms, had occurred and continued to occur and that the principle controlling these transformations was natural selection . According to Darwin, life developed through adaptation and variation toward more complexity. He summarized his claim in the last sentence of The Origin of Species: “whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.” Darwin’s assertion sounds rather innocuous. Why would such a statement cause major cultural debates? One reason that Darwin’s theory scandalized the Victorian public was that it clashed with the Christian account of creation and the study of natural history in the tradition of natural theology. Whereas earlier natural philosophers, such as William Paley, or even...

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