Description
Book SynopsisA study of Darwin's Legacy for relegion, ecology and the arts. It argues that poetry can have a profound impact on how we think and feel about the human condition in a Darwinian world. It includes over 50 complete poems and substantial extracts from several more, Holmes shows how poets have responded to the discovery of evolution.
Table of ContentsA. R. Ammons: 'Questionable Procedures'; Philip Appleman: 'How Evolution Came to Indiana', 'Waldorf-Astoria Euphoria'; D. M. Black: 'Kew Gardens'; Mathilde Blind: The Ascent of Man [extracts]; Robert Browning: 'Caliban upon Setebos' [extracts]; William Canton: 'The Latter Law' [sonnet from a sequence]; Stephen Crane: 'A man said to the universe'; Richard Eberhart: 'Sea-Hawk'; Robert Frost: 'Design', 'The Oven Bird', 'The Most of It', 'Our Hold on the Planet'; Thom Gunn: 'Adultery', 'The Garden of the Gods'; Thomas Hardy: 'Hap', 'Your Last Drive', 'Rain on a Grave', 'At Castle Boterel', 'An August Midnight', 'The Darkling Thrush', 'Shelley's Skylark', 'The Fallow Deer at the Lonely House', 'To Outer Nature', 'On a Fine Morning'; Robinson Jeffers: 'Vulture', Cawdor [extract], 'Rock and Hawk'; George Meredith: 'The Woods of Westermain' [opening lyric], 'In the Woods' [8 lyrics out of a sequence of 9], 'The Lark Ascending' [extracts], Modern Love [3 sonnets from a sequence], 'Ode to the Spirit of Earth in Autumn' [extracts]; Edna St Vincent Millay: 'The Fawn', 'I shall forget you presently, my dear', Fatal Interview [2 sonnets from a sequence]; Edwin Morgan: 'Eohippus', 'The Archaeopteryx's Song', 'Trilobites'; Lewis Morris: 'Ode of Creation' [extract]; Constance Naden: 'Natural Selection'; Agnes Mary Robinson: 'Darwinism'; Pattiann Rogers: 'Against the Ethereal', 'The Possible Suffering of a God During Creation', 'Geocentric'; Neil Rollinson: 'My Father Shaving Charles Darwin'; John Addington Symonds: 'An Old Gordian Knot' [sonnet from a sequence]; Alfred Tennyson: 'Flower in the Crannied Wall', 'By an Evolutionist', 'The Dawn', 'The Making of Man', 'Frater Ave atque Vale', 'Lucretius' [extracts].