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Wordsworth & Darwin

Christine Avery wonders whether poetry can help us to deal with science.

In his poetic autobiography The Prelude (1799), William Wordsworth describes a dream in which he saw an Arab horseman riding by at desperate speed carrying a stone and a shell. The stone represented reason and science, while the shell stood for poetry and prophecy. Both were seen to be in urgent danger, and it’s clear that Wordsworth attributed equal and supreme value to both of them.

Whether the danger to these values has increased or diminished since Wordsworth’s time (1770-1850) would be hard to estimate, but it seems clear that reason and science have steadily gained prestige at the expense of poetry and imagination. This has only been strengthened by the forces of positivism and reductionism, with their battering formula of ‘this is only that’. According to reductionism, biology in the end boils down to chemistry, and chemistry to physics, and the implication drawn might be that poetry boils down to biology. But the battle is far from over.

In her excellent 2009 book Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and 19th Century Fiction, Gillian Beer contrasts the disciples of reason with more imaginative creators. Beer lays out Sigmund Freud’s claim that “the universal narcissism of men, their self-love, has up to the present suffered three severe blows from the researches of science” (originally from ‘A Difficulty in the Path of Psycho-Analysis’, 1953). These blows are, in chronological order: the Copernican revolution displacing the Earth from the centre of the universe; the Darwinian argument that ‘man is not a being different from animals or superior to them’; and, thirdly, Freud’s own demonstration that ‘the ego is not master in its own house’ since we often act with unconscious motivation. These ‘blows’ to humanity’s sense of specialness, are connected as successive steps forward of the rational mind.

Is it just evidence of human adaptability that these ‘blows’ on human identity seem successively lighter? And as for the first, perhaps I am not alone in feeling pleased that we are not stuck in a relatively small and stuffy pre-Copernican cosmos, hemmed in by concentric crystal spheres, with Hell burning away not far beneath our feet.

Darwinian evolution by natural selection was evidently a hard idea for many to accept. Beer writes of the deep ‘physical shudder’ many Victorians experienced from perceiving the new relationship between humans and animals – a gut feeling of threat as the primitive and irrational threatens to take over rational humanity. I suggest that the real threat here is to the natural archetype of ‘human difference’ − an idea without which the human mind, with all its sociological matrices, cannot work at all. If strongly-felt differences between humanity and the rest of the world are denied, mental and emotional confusion, muddle and madness, hardly seem far away. Presently – roughly 165 years after The Origin of Species was published in 1859 – many of us might feel exalted rather than debased by our kinship with beasts, and indeed with all other things, both organic and inorganic. But perhaps contrasts in one’s picture of the world, including one’s own difference from others, are necessary for the mind to maintain its sense of identity? If so, where now do we ground our sense of difference? Some harmfully and unsustainably project difference onto race, culture, or gender. With the same basic motivation (‘Let’s have some conflict!’), many critics trenchantly demand that art should be disturbing, confrontational, always jolting us into some radical rearrangement of our ideas.

Wordsworth and Darwin by Venantius J. Pinto 2025

There were other challenging aspects of Darwin’s theories, too. William Herschel’s Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (1831) had, in the young Charles Darwin (1809-1882), “stirred up a burning zeal to add even the most humble contribution to the noble structure of Natural Science.” However, Herschel later described Darwinian evolution as “the law of higgledy-piggledy”, because everything seemed to happen piecemeal and randomly. Furthermore, if, as Darwin’s champion T.H. Huxley put it, “there is no interruption and no breach in the continuity of natural causation,” can we, as part of Nature, maintain the sense of freedom and choice on which our humanity depends? (Nowadays, perhaps there are ways, such as General Systems Theory, capable of springing us from the deterministic trap, by showing for example that the universe can unfurl in essentially unpredictable ways, throwing up new realities of which we are a part and to which we can consciously creatively contribute.)

From the purely materialistic or naturalistic perspective first made popular by Darwinian evolution, all moral and aesthetic judgements are illusory, or at best, merely subjective. If everything everyone does is natural (because there is nothing else for it to be), why do we continue to fight injustice, or try to ‘save’ the biosphere? Again, differences seem to melt into a soporific greyness, an anti-human hopelessness.

In spite of this, and perhaps partly by ignoring the implications, people have continued making distinctions and choices and acting upon them, aided and abetted by the creative nature of language. The human mind as a whole has survived the blows of science (when it has survived), by storytelling, poetry, and the discriminating, difference-finding sense of beauty. For example, John Stuart Mill turned to Wordsworth to rescue him from a nervous breakdown brought on by the blankness and bleakness of a materialist philosophy, for example.

I would like to draw attention to Freud’s blatantly macho mode of expression in describing the three scientific revolutions as ‘three blows’. Proposing that the ego should be ‘master in its own house’ is patriarchy in a phrase, and Freud’s reference to man’s narcissism seems grounded in male social dominance rather than in an idea of inclusive humanity. Instead of seeing the psychoanalytic conquistador riding out to colonize the darkness, we could think of the exploring embodied mind of either gender as creating new connections between the darkness and the light, the rational and the spontaneous. This leads us to conceiving humanity as individuals who interact with (mostly) good intentions, hopefulness, and attention to feedback, but still never expecting to know the full meaning of what they’re doing. There is no way that the rational light will stretch all around us, so the remaining darkness will have to be trusted. With this understanding, we can, for example, reaffirm a kinship with animals, which will probably always remain ambivalent. There is no need to cuddle up with snakes, tigers or tarantulas; but every need not to harm them without good cause. At the same time there is the poetic and restorative sense of there being one fabric of being: a variously coloured and intricately patterned fabric which includes both the organic and the inorganic. Darwin has stamped a sense of biological kinship deeply on the modern mind; and the cosmology which derives our bodies’ constituent elements from ancient stars only takes the connection further. But Wordsworth’s imagination has been there before, as we can see from an early fragment, where he writes of “a heart that vibrates evermore, awake / To feeling for all forms that Life can take, / That wider still its sympathy extends / And sees not any line where being ends” (‘An Evening Walk’, 1793).

The greatest threat to this sense of wholeness or unity may finally not be anything philosophical, but rather the existence of inexplicable pain, alongside the judgement that this pain is too great, too destructive, not bearable by fragile human beings. We (properly?) remain divided in an emotional dualism which will never routinely or permanently convert the unacceptable into the affirmative. Darwin, who himself suffered greatly from the death of his young daughter from disease, nevertheless wrote, with a very non-literary haltingness, that “According to my judgment, happiness [among sentient beings] decidedly prevails, though this would be difficult to prove… Some other considerations, moreover, lead to the belief that all sentient beings have been formed to enjoy, as a general rule, happiness” (Autobiography, 1876). Wordsworth also confronted loss and grief – his own and other people’s – and this, for him, became part of ‘the slow, sad music of humanity’, to hear which remains paradoxically consoling.

Darwin also wrote in his Autobiography of “the extreme difficulty or rather impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capacity of looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity. When thus reflecting I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man; and I deserve to be called a Theist.” However, with scrupulous honesty, he goes on to weaken this conclusion by asking, “may the mind of man, which has, as I fully believe, been developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest animal, be trusted when it draws such grand conclusions?” He decides that it can’t − apparently because of a lingering implied (and questionable) contempt for the minds of gorillas − and so he says, “I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic.” This is Darwin’s modest conclusion. There is an air of leaden resignation about it. In Wordsworth we have a more inclusive, inspiring, truth-claiming but undogmatic, poetic vision. For Wordsworth, Nature was a shaping spirit whose “dark, invisible workmanship… reconciles discordant elements.” Personified as a ‘she’, Nature provides guidance – sometimes gentle, sometimes fierce, but always adding up to a sense of meaning, incorporating nobility and a deeper enjoyment of the universe. This poetry of experience can’t help making truth claims which, of course, people approaching from a different point of view are at liberty to deny. Wordsworth recognised that what he called the ‘ape philosophy’ would be likely to skewer poets and visionaries on such derogatory terms as ‘imposters, drivellers, dotards’. But we are left with intelligible alternatives which we can bring into sharp focus. Of these, the Wordsworthian conclusion is surely both reasonable and encouraging, whereas the Darwinian is arguably reasonable and discouraging. So with all due respect to as great a scientist as Darwin, and still wanting to save both stone and shell from cultural disaster, I would argue that Wordsworth is the better guide and example for human life.

Christine Avery has an MA from Somerville College, Oxford, an MA from Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, and a PhD from Exeter University.