Abstract
As one would expect from Darwin after knowing his physiological and univocal theories, the couplet art that he practiced was blatant aestheticism — artificial, technically intricate, and very much removed from everyday life. Like modern Formalists, Darwin is continually conscious of what is “literary” about literature, and takes great pains to thicken the language of his couplets. Ironically, the weakest thing in much of his couplet art is that he chooses word patterns and “devices” that are not artificial enough in the sense that by the time he uses them they are too familiar as thickening devices for poetic language. Again, what is most interesting, though, is his theory and the problems it created for his art because his problems are still to a great extent our problems. The Russian Formalist and American New Criticism movements have produced a theory of literature based on the “scientific” study of taste and imaginative motion much more sophisticated and various than Darwin’s, but with some of the same problems. This makes his early ratiocinations all the more important for study.
[he] wrote his couplet yearly to the spring,
As dissertation of profound delight . . .
Sonorous nutshells rattling inwardly.
Wallace Stevens, “The Comedian as the Letter C”
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References
See Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis, eds., Russian Formalist Criticism, Four Essays (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965)
and Rene Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1956).
W. K Wimsatt Jr., The Verbal Icon, Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (New York: Anchor, 1965), p. 217.
Lynn Arthur Steen, “New Models of the Real-Number Line,” in Scientific American, 225 (August, 1971), 99.
Wellek and Warren, p. 242.
W. K Wimsatt Jr. and Monroe C. Beardsley, “The Concept of Meter: An Exercise in Abstraction,” in PMLA, 74 (1959), 597. This essay has been reprinted by Wimsatt in his book Hateful Contraries (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1965), pp. 108–145.
Paul Fussell, Jr., Theory of Prosody in Eighteenth-Century England (New London: Connecticut College, 1954), p. 43.
In a more general account of meter, Fussell writes: Because the idea of the foot has been imported into modern accentual-syllabic scansion from classical quantitative practice, quarrels about its nature and even its existence have been loud and long since the Renaissance. Paul Fussell, Jr., Poetic Meter and Poetic Form (New York: Random House, 1965), p. 23.
Fussell, Theory of Prosody..., p. 25.
Ibid., p. 8.
Ibid., p. 67.
Ibid., p. 109. Fussell calls the theorists who held this theory “bar-foot analogists.” The most important of these were Charles Gildon, Samuel Say, John Mason, Joshua Steele, and William Mitford.
Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden, Part II, fifth edition (London: J. Johnson, 1799), pp. 61–62.
Ibid., p. 175.
Ibid., Canto III, 11. 93–100. I realize, of course, that the linguists distinguish four degrees of stress, but rather agree with John Crowe Ransom that the linguistic approach by implication posits even more degrees of stress in any given reading while the abstract pattern requires the simpler distinction between stress and lack of stress.
See Ransom, “The Strange Music of English Verse,” in Kenyon Review, 18 (Summer, 1956), 460–477.
Anna Seward, Memoirs of the Life of Dr. Darwin (London: J. Johnson, 1804), pp. 180–181.
Darwin, “The Loves of the Plants,” canto I, 11. 152–156. Whenever I find it necessary to scan a line (if it is obviously iambic, I do not scan), I will use traditional scansion primarily because it works so well with Darwin’s verse.
In other words, Darwin’s tri-syllabic substitutions are sometimes merely a matter of spelling. But spelling does often indicate pronunciation. Other trisyllabic substitutions are decidedly not merely the spelling out of previous dropped syllables. See examples in the text. The elision of vowels between two words is called “apocope.” The omission of a vowel within a word is called “syncope.” And the elision of adjoining vowels within words is called “synaeresis.” For the classification of these figures in Renaissance rhetoric, see Sister Miriam Joseph, Rhetoric in Shakespeare’s Time (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1962).
Darwin, “The Economy of Vegetation,” canto III, 11. 19–20.
Ibid., canto II, 11. 379–80.
Fussell, Theory of Prosody..., p. 116.
Darwin, “The Economy of Vegetation,” canto III, 11. 437–440.
Darwin, The Temple of Nature, canto I, 11.233–250.
For the origin of the couplet, see Ruth Wallerstein, “The Development of the Rhetoric and Metre of the Heroic Couplet, Especially in 1625–1645” in Bernard Schilling, ed., Essential Articles for the Study of English Augustan Backgrounds (Hamden: Archon, 1961). For the simultaneous interest in the figures, see Sister Miriam Joseph’s discussion of the difference between the figurists, the traditionalists, and the Ramists in the English Renaissance. Briefly, the figurists, among whom the most famous was Puttenham, were in favor of teaching only elocution, one of the five parts of rhetoric. Elocution dealt only with the figures of speech. But actually the figurists included all the other parts of rhetoric, such as invention, as figures of speech. Sister Miriam Joseph, pp. 13ff.
Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon, pp. 175–76.
Quoted in Charles Darwin, preliminary notice to Ernst Krause, Erasmus Darwin (London, 1879), p. 10.
Geoffrey Tillotson, Augustan Poetic Diction (London: University of London, 1964), pp. 14–15.
Jacob Adler, The Reach of Art, A Study in the Prosody of Pope (Gainsville: Univ. of Florida, 1964), pp. 12–17.
See my doctoral dissertation The Poems of Erasmus Darwin, Diss. Columbia Univ. 1967.
Darwin, The Botanic Garden, Part II, p. xvi.
Darwin, “The Loves of the Plants,” canto I, 11.69–76.
Darwin, “The Economy of Vegetation,” canto II, 11 151–82.
Ibid., canto IV, 11. 249–50.
Darwin, “The Loves of the Plants,” canto IV, 11. 431–32.
Darwin, “The Economy of Vegetation,” canto I, 11. 43–44.
Ibid., canto II, 11.147–48.
Ibid., canto I, 11.441–42.
Darwin, “The Loves of the Plants,” canto III, 11. 13–14.
Darwin, The Temple of Nature, canto I. 11. 119–20.
Ibid., canto I, 11.143–144.
Ibid., canto I , 11. 153–54. 48 Seward, pp. 308–09.
Ibid., canto ΠΙ, 11. 51–52. See Paradise Lost, II, 11. 614–28.
Darwin, The Temple of Nature, canto I, 11. 407–408.
Ibid., canto II, 11. 299–300.
Tillotson, pp. 93–94. See also p. 24.
Darwin, “The Economy of Vegetation,” canto II, 11. 395–412.
Logan, p. 84.
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© 1973 Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands
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Hassler, D.M. (1973). Making it Strange Technically. In: The Comedian as the Letter D: Erasmus Darwin’s Comic Materialism. Archives Internationales d’histoire des Idees / International Archives of the History of Ideas, vol 6. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-2461-7_4
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