About 10 years ago, Jenny Uglow wrote an article on Darwin for the Gaurdian, urging a recovery of his poetry.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/sep/21/featuresreviews.guardianreview30
As Uglow argues, when we see Darwin in own historical moment of 1780s Britain, he is quite radical in many of his beliefs, religious scientific and social (and much more liberal than many of his contemporaries, especially in his support of abolition and other reform agendas, including the cause of female education). The poem-treatise combination is itself a radical way of writing, and certainly he used this form to reach a wider audience and to put forward views that went against conventional norms. This is not, however, to say that Darwin conforms to *our* standards or views about relationships between men and women--he was a product of his moment, as were all the poets that we are reading in this course. But it is telling that women poets, novelists and philosophers admired Darwin and used his work to promote their own work. Whatever the content of his poem implies (and as you can see it is not at all easy to determine what his overarching message was), the way women authors used it was to empower themselves and stake a claim for their right to speak and publish on scientific and political subjects.
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