Erasmus Darwin has been something of a conundrum for historians of science. Although widely considered one of evolutionary biology's most important philosophical precursors, his surname invariably connotes his grandson's scientific contributions. While he inspired many late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century women writers, he also popularized a blatantly essentialist sexual system of classification. And perhaps most vexingly, because his verse helped spawn a generation of Romantic thought, Darwin is all too often given short shrift as a kind of proto-Romantic thinker and poet, rather than being considered on his own late Enlightenment terms. Martin Priestman's The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin: Enlightened Spaces, Romantic Times, however, threads together these predicaments and more with particular reference to Darwin's late eighteenth-century cultural milieu. The result is a welcome reconsideration of Darwin and his precarious intellectual world.

Darwin occupied the radical end of this volatile late Enlightenment cultural spectrum. He was anti-slavery and staunchly materialist, most notably in his far-sighted argument for the evolution of life from a single ocean ‘filament’ (p. 113). Priestman also illuminates the fascinating (and historiographically neglected) world of esoteric secret societies in which Darwin moved, including Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry, which came under particular anti-Jacobin scrutiny over the course of the 1790s, while Darwin's own freethinking Lunar Society was destroyed outright in a wave of anti-dissenting violence. Excerpts from Darwin's Economy of Vegetation circulated as stand-alone revolutionary propaganda, and moreover provoked suspicions that no less than ‘the first poet of the age’ (p. 198) had been the unsigned author of a notorious manifesto calling for universal male suffrage.

Darwin's anti-establishment credentials with respect to gender are less sure-footed, owing to the ways in which his Linnaeus-inspired, heavily anthropomorphic Loves of the Plants propagated traditional views with respect to gender hierarchy, and pruriently emphasized women's sexuality. Priestman challenges this interpretation by pointing out that Loves personifies pistils as knowledgeable or powerful women, whom the stamens admire and to whom they defer. Even the book's description of a Tahitian nuptial orgy might, Priestman suggests, be read as subverting patriarchal gender ideology. So too for the gender dualism that structures the volume – with its masculine, cutting-edge taxonomical science, and feminine, versified embellishments – which promulgates these separate spheres even while it playfully invites readers to transgress them. This may help explain the wide circulation of Loves amongst women poets and philosophers, even if some preferred to view plants in less salacious terms.

This radicalism, Priestman argues, drew sustenance from a thoroughgoing orientation toward (Enlightened) spatial rather than (Romantic) temporal ways of knowing, which The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin underlines throughout Darwin's verse. Spatiality emerges technically, for instance, in a grammatical preference for ‘typifying’ (p. 39) definite articles signifying timeless objects already placed and described, in poetic arrangements that convey a sense of aural or grammatical symmetry, and in picture-like synecdoches that invite readers to intuit wholes from parts. To William Wordsworth's and Samuel Coleridge's displeasure, spatiality also figures in Darwin's didactic penchant for packing his verse with as much scholarly substance as possible, rather than viewing poems as affect-driven narratives that unfold in ‘emotional time’ (p. 224). Where temporality does surface in Darwin's poetry, Priestman demonstrates how this is offset by ‘spatializing aesthetics’. The Temple of Nature's evolutionary hypothesis, for instance, is restrained by its quaternary structure (‘Press drop to drop, to atom atom bind, / Link sex to sex, or rivet mind to mind’) (p. 104), which emphasizes spatial symmetry over developmental temporal flow.

Darwin's numerous references to ancient mythography set similar store by mythical figurations not as time-driven narratives, but as declensions from pictographic originals that held timeless natural-philosophical truths. Cupid could thus be read as a symbol for atomic attraction, and the rape of Proserpine serve as an allegory for the process of oxidation. According to Darwin and others of an abolitionist and atheist mindset, Egyptian hieroglyphs epitomized this pictographic foundation, which degenerated thereafter into the temporally constituted lives and deeds of Greek and Roman gods. These interests fed into Darwin's affiliation with Freemasonry, with its emphasis on recuperating ancient, esoteric, pictographic truths via elaborate ritual movements between carefully measured points on the floors of Masonic lodges or temples. The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin captivatingly asserts that Freemasonry's attempt to overcome degenerative temporality via journeys through highly formalized spaces was essentially an effort to spatialize time.

Romantics, of course, would see things differently. But this transformation was not wrought overnight, and Priestman points to significant areas of overlap, from William Blake's eye for mental and material symmetry, to the Darwin-inspired scientific poetry of Eleanor Porden, and even Darwin's own unpublished foray into the temporal domain of human history (which Priestman includes as an appendix). Then again, these imbrications also hint at the potential shortcomings of what the author himself admits is a hard-and-fast ‘distinction between “space” and “time” which risks its own distortions' (p. 257), albeit one advanced in the name of Darwin's own overdetermined binary world view. The book's recuperation of Enlightenment abolitionism, radicalism and proto-feminism also appears to come partly at the expense of acknowledging spatiality's less salutary aspects, not least the role of the concept of terra nullius in British imperial expansion, or that of Linnaean tabulations in marginalizing indigenous knowledge and cultures.

On the whole, however, Priestman's space–time schema underpins an illuminating and provocative study of the social, political and epistemological implications of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century patterns of thought. What is more, The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin's Enlightenment-centred line of inquiry vitally rescues Darwin from being seen as ‘the “before” aspect of a kind of “before-and-after” commercial for Romanticism’ (p. 217). The book is also augmented by extensive engagement with pertinent scholarship in-text, references to which are copiously footnoted and (most helpfully) indexed. All this adds up to a soon-to-be-standard work of reference in the field of Erasmus Darwin studies, and a volume that warrants careful consideration among scholars of Enlightenment and early Romantic culture.