Regenerating Romanticism
Bailes, Melissa Within key texts of Romantic-era aesthetics, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and other writers and theorists pointed to the poet, naturalist, and physician Erasmus Darwin as exemplifying a lack of originality and sensibility in the period's scientific literature-the very qualities that such literature had actually sought to achieve. The success of this strawman tactic in establishing Romantic principles resulted in the historical ...