Darwin's Bards offers a comprehensive assessment of how a range of American and British poets over the last 150 years have addressed the question of Darwinism. Considering a diverse assortment of poets, from Alfred Tennyson and Charles Algernon Swinburne to Thomas Hardy, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Thom Gunn, and Edwin Morgan, John Holmes demonstrates in considerable detail how poets have contended with the intellectual, philosophical, spiritual, and moral implications of Darwin's theories of evolution. Holmes makes a compelling case for recognizing how poetry informs contemporary perceptions and understandings of Darwinism and illuminates, by means of some deft close readings of pertinent poems, what it means “to live in a Darwinian world” (5). Holmes begins his book with some attentive close readings of two poems by the contemporary Scottish poet Edwin Morgan (1920–2010) which serve to illustrate “the different things a poet can do with Darwinism” (28). It is to Holmes's credit that he sustains this quality of close reading throughout his book. Indeed, one of the principal pleasures when reading Darwin's Bards is the way in which Holmes scrupulously reads and explicates his broad range of poems. Indeed, by his own diligent example Holmes partly answers one of his most salient questions, “how can a poem alter our perspective on a scientific world view such as Darwinism?” (27).

In addition to these insightful analyses of what Holmes persuasively argues are “Darwinian” poems, Holmes also takes great effort in explaining how Darwinism itself, or rather interpretations of it, have dynamically and contentiously evolved over a 150-year period. Indeed, Holmes's book is particularly useful for comprehending Darwin's ideas in the context of the scientific milieu of his own time, as well as for understanding the nuanced debates and claims advanced by more recent exponents of Darwinism. Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins, in particular, figure prominently in Holmes's consideration of contemporary readings of Darwinism. While these names provide a valuable context for Holmes's careful and intelligent critique of several spurious theories that have set out to challenge Darwinism – cultural relativism, creationism, and the theory of intelligent design – one is left wondering if there are other credible voices and positions on the question of Darwinism in addition to what appear to be its two main dominant spokespersons, Dawkins and Gould. In this context, considering that Holmes's principal subjects are Darwinism and poetry, it is both surprising and a shame that Holmes does not consider the work and ideas of the American natural-science writer Loren Eiseley (1907–77), who not only wrote popular studies of evolutionary thinking – Darwin's Century: Evolution and the Men Who Discovered It (1958) and Darwin and the Mysterious Mr. X: New Light on the Evolutionists (1979) – but also had three collections of poetry published during his lifetime. Eiseley may lack the steely rigor of a Gould – or the prosodic mastery of a Hughes – nevertheless, it would be insightful to see how Holmes would have assessed the role that poetry might have played in Eiseley's passionate, and accessible, espousal of evolutionism.

Another sadly absent “bard” is the American poet Lorine Niedecker (1903–70). Her poem “Darwin” – which quotes luminous fragments from the scientist's autobiography – is but the most immediately apparent example of her engagement with natural history and evolutionary thought. Indeed, Niedecker's penchant for quotation and allusion offers another perspective on Holmes's compelling observation about the “intertextual dialogues that cross the different generations of Darwinian poets” across the Atlantic from the mid-nineteenth century up to the mid-twentieth (27).

Holmes's ideas regarding the “bad faith” he identifies in Swinburne and Mathilde Blind's respective engagements with Darwinism offer a poignant summary of what is perhaps the book's most important claim (54). Noting how capable both poets are for fully comprehending “the Darwinian state of nature,” Holmes concludes that although “we may sympathise with their reluctance to face the full consequence of their knowledge … their poems remain at the last reckoning, dishonest” (54). As Holmes suggests in his conclusion, and as his book demonstrates, such assessments offer a sobering reminder of just how unsettling Darwin's ideas can be for those willing enough to “confront what it might mean to live in a purely material universe, if that is indeed the fate to which Darwinism consigns us” (260).