Signs of Change: Percy Shelley's Language of Mutability as Precursor to Darwin's Theory of Evolution

Abstract

AbstractThis essay argues that the poetry of Percy Shelley may have contributed to Charles Darwin's ability to conceptualize forces of change in the natural world. The work of Shelley occupies a key position in the development of pre‐Darwinian thought about change and transformation. His early interest in Lockean empiricism and his knowledge of the natural sciences have long been recognized by scholars working on romanticism and science. Less explored are the ways in which the poetry of Shelley has a bearing on the intellectual challenge Darwin faced in interpreting signs of change in the natural world. Shelley's poetry offers an account of how such change reveals itself: an account based not on a priori concepts of divine language, but on material evidence of the power of natural phenomena to convey information. In this way, poetry and science come into relation with each other.Like most young men of his time, Darwin would have been aware of Shelley's controversial reputation. What survives of the correspondence between the young Darwin and his friend the aspiring poet Henry Matthew, who was his contemporary at Cambridge, indicates that the two men had intense debates about Shelley's work, and about his notoriety as a materialist and atheist. Though no details are given, the correspondence does indicate that both of them read the poet's work and had conversations about it.Shelley's use of an evolving poetic/mythological vocabulary, putting pressure on the conventional meanings of words (a kind of linguistic change) to enable the reader to conceive of global processes of change, strongly advanced Romantic‐era thinking in this regard. Shelley's enthusiasm for the materialist philosophy of Lucretius provided him with good authority for the belief that the natural world was inhabited by forces that would powerfully impinge upon the minds of humans. His mature poetics remained open to the idea that observing the operations of these natural forces, traceable in the geological record, would reveal signs of terrestrial change and prepare the awakened mind for a future transformed world. Darwin (for all his well‐known anxiety about challenging Christian beliefs) would have had in Shelley's poetry a productive model for conceptualizing the processes of nature, combining in such works as “Mont Blanc” and Prometheus Unbound changes in the referentiality of linguistic signs with observed changes in the forms of nature.