Natural history and epiphany: Elizabeth Bishop's Darwin Letter

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 2004 by Zachariah Pickard

Bishop is closer to the modernists on this front and closer, particularly, to what Altieri calls "the romantic values they were ostensively denying" (77). She departs from the narrative of impersonality, as her choice of scientist hero makes clear. If the ideas about science that the modernists invoke in their discussion of poetry and art reflect modern, experimentalist scientific practices, Bishop, by choosing a scientist from another era, one who practiced a form of science that had largely ceased to exist, steps away from the dominant discourse of poetry as science and instead invokes Victorian natural history as her model.

Darwin and his colleagues have little in common with the lab-coated figures that Eliot's imagery summons up, and one must leave behind certain ideas about the disinterestedness and impersonality of science and its emphasis on precision and specialization in order to understand what exactly Bishop is invoking when she chooses Darwin as her artistic model. Victorian natural history does not agree well with more contemporary ideas about science on any number of levels: it prefers observation in the field to experimentation in the laboratory; it does "not require any great accuracy in [...] measurements" (Darwin, Autobiography 100); and it is practiced largely by untrained or half-trained enthusiasts like Darwin himself. Most importantly, though, natural history differs from a more modern notion of science in that it is organized around accumulation rather than reduction. This emphasis on accumulation exists on a number of levels, from the physical work of collecting specimens to the all-encompassing scope of natural history's inquiry.

Even in his own time, Darwin's type of science was falling out of fashion. In the "most thoroughly marked and underlined page" in Bishop's copy of the Autobiography (Rognoni 246), Darwin's son Francis points out that his father wrote and worked in a "non-modern spirit and manner" and that he was "a Naturalist in the old sense of the word, that is, a man who works at many branches of science, not merely a specialist in one" (Autobiography 106). This model of science was rapidly losing ground, and by the middle of the nineteenth century "natural history had fragmented into separate scientific disciplines and broken into subdisciplines" (Farber 33). Darwin, rather than specializing, published on a wide array of subjects, including among other things coral reefs, mould, barnacles, worms, orchids, insectivorous plants, the expression of emotion, and, of course, species. As a natural historian, Darwin follows Buffon, whose 36-volume Histoire naturelle, generale et particuliere (1749-1804) became "the encyclopedia of the natural world" (Farber 20) by providing a "complete natural history of all living beings and minerals" (14). For Buffon and for Darwin, natural history is, quite literally, the history of nature, the study of all physical things over all of time. This model of science is obviously very different from the more specialized one invoked by the modernists and their heirs, and it implies a very different set of values and work habits.