The Botanic Garden - Reception and Legacy

Reception and Legacy

The Botanic Garden was reissued repeatedly in Britain, Ireland and the United States throughout the 1790s and until the publication of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads in 1798, Darwin was considered one of England's preeminent poets. His poems, with their “dynamic vision of change and transformation”, resonated with the ideals of the French revolution. However, when the revolution entered its more radical and bloody phase, scientific progress became associated with what many started to see as a failed revolution. Anti-Jacobins, who were opposed to the French revolution, denounced the sexual freedom gaining ground in France and linked it to the scientific projects of men like Darwin. George Canning and John Frere published a parody of The Loves of the Plants in the Anti-Jacobin Review in 1798 (see 1798 in poetry) titled “Loves of the Triangles”, suggesting just these connections.

Darwin's poems were not published during the first two decades of the nineteenth century as the conservative reaction solidified in Britain. However, bowdlerized and sentimentalized poems imitating Darwin's became increasingly popular and the analogy between plants and humans lasted well into the nineteenth century, with Alice in Wonderland one of the many books to employ the image.

Darwin's unique poetic style impressed some while it revolted others. Wordsworth called it “dazzling" while Coleridge said, “I absolutely nauseate Darwin's poem”. Darwin's “visionary temperament” became an integral part of popular science writing and one can see a modern manifestation of it in Carl Sagan's Cosmos series.