“A Wondrous Lesson in thy Silent Face”: Keats, Darwin, and the Geological Sublime

Abstract

Erasmus Darwin’s writings, which laid the foundation for his grandson Charles’s concepts of variation, natural selection, heredity, and the survival of the fittest, constituted a province of knowledge that colored and deeply troubled John Keats’s thinking. The impact of Darwinian tenets upon Keats’s imagination is most apparent in the verse epistle to John Hamilton Reynolds in the poet’s terrible vision of “an eternal fierce destruction,” a lurid scene almost directly transferable from Darwin’s The Temple of Nature. Keats’s poetry and epistolary prose are not innocent of an apprehension of the harsh reality of a state of nature that is “red in tooth and claw,” nor does Keats’s thought shy away from confronting the disturbing potential of the “geological sublime,” a fascination with the ancient history of the earth and the subversive idea that creatures occupy an ephemeral and insignificant place within its vast temporal continuum. We can tease out from Keats’s poems and letters a pattern of coping with these harsh facts of life by abstracting or anaesthetizing oneself. Keats’s strategy of evasion or withdrawal constitutes his authentic aesthetic and ethical response to the sublime horrors that a Darwinian or geological model of reality, when scrutinized by Keats’s imagination, might prompt, even if it cannot fairly be described as a remedial measure.