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Article Dans Une Revue Etudes Anglaises Année : 2019

Poetry, Fossils, and the Flesh of Time in Erasmus Darwin’s The Temple of Nature

Résumé

When he looked at fossilised sea-shells, the poet and naturalist Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802) read the gradual transformation of species through “millions of ages” in their “glossy volumes.” In his poetry, fossilised shells look like strange artefacts no one crafted: the original organism acts either as the mould or as the raw material of the fossil emerging out of it, as if sculpted by time from the inside. The genesis of life-forms seems to take place outside divine intervention, through a series of negligible transformations: the imperceptible substitutes itself for the Unseen. In these beautiful forms, carved by death, time generates artistic forms. Destruction writes itself into a narrative of creation, and as the work of time becomes legible in the forms of the fossil, time fleshes itself out.
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hal-02128197 , version 1 (14-05-2019)

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  • HAL Id : hal-02128197 , version 1

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Sophie Laniel-Musitelli. Poetry, Fossils, and the Flesh of Time in Erasmus Darwin’s The Temple of Nature. Etudes Anglaises, 2019, 1 (72), pp.83-96. ⟨hal-02128197⟩
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