Natural history and epiphany: Elizabeth Bishop's Darwin Letter

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 2004 by Zachariah Pickard

The precision now associated with science is based on ideas of specialization and reduction, and when the modernists use science as a model for poetry, they tend to invoke such ideas. For Moore, the scientist and poet "must narrow the choice," and it is the impulse toward the sleek that drives Pound to prefer "the way of the scientists rather than the way of an advertising agent for a new soap." Moore and Pound are speaking here of different parts of the creative process, but the impulse is similar. Moore focuses on perception, on the work to be done before composition, and compares it to the work of the scientist eliminating possible hypotheses, narrowing the choices in order to find the correct one; Pound is focused on the act of writing itself, the building up of words on the page, and endorses the concision of scientific prose. Moore, in other words, is trimming ideas before sitting down to write; Pound is holding back words that are desperate to fill his page. For both, science is precise in that it reduces; less is more.

Darwin works in the opposite direction, by accretion, as is perhaps inevitable when one's topic is all of the natural world. As James Paradis argues, the phenomena that natural history seeks to explain are "hidden from the senses" because they take place over "magnitudes of space and time that human physiology [is] not equipped to apprehend" (93). As a result, it is only through the slow accumulation of individual "moments of perception" that the natural historian can gain access to the history of nature (94). No single reported fact is of use, but through what Bishop calls the "almost unconscious or automatic" process of observation, a substantial enough body of material develops, and the natural historian can synthesize and extrapolate. In this sense, natural history is a science not only of physical collection--the natural history museum of today has its origin in the curiosity cabinet of the sixteenth century--but of intellectual collection. And these two notions of collection are intricately linked in Darwin, as his Autobiography suggests:

     By the time I went to day-school my taste for natural history, and
     more especially for collecting, was well developed. [...] The
     passion for collecting which leads a man to be a systematic
     naturalist, a virtuoso, or a miser, was very strong in me. (6)

Collection here is both a more specialized subset of natural history and the underlying habit of mind that "leads a man to be a systematic naturalist." The principle of collection, that is, structures both the work one does and the way one thinks.

The basic intellectual process of natural history moves from collection to synthesis, as the very first page of On the Origin of Species suggests:

     it occurred to me, in 1837, that something might perhaps be made
     out on this question [of species] by patiently accumulating and
     reflecting on all sorts of facts which could possibly have any
     bearing on it. (95)

Where the concrete work of natural history is a process of what Bishop calls "heroic observations," the eventual intellectual work is a process of immense synthesis. Darwin characterized his own mind as "a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts" (Autobiography 54), and it is crucial to his method that all of the facts--"all sorts of facts which could possibly have any bearing"--be incorporated. This basic method of accumulation and synthesis preserves a certain mystery that more modern notions of science can lack. Moore's gradual elimination of hypotheses is a sure and steady process, which has no moment of--for lack of a better word--inspiration. Eliot, by likening the creative process to a chemical reaction, implies that the creation of art is methodical, even inevitable, so long as one has the appropriate materials. But in Darwin's method there is an unexpected moment given to the scientist, a sudden shift, what Bishop calls a "sinking or sliding giddily off into the unknown." As plodding as the process of collection may seem, it builds toward a moment of vision at which an internal, abstract world emerges.