Darwin Now: Life through poetry...

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My mother’s mother, Nora Barlow, was one of the grandchildren of Charles Darwin. She was the daughter of Horace Darwin, his ninth child, and she was very, very interesting because she was trained as a biologist and she got very, very interested in the archive and in editing the letters, editing his journals, she also edited his autobiography. And, you know, she was a great influence on my life. We loved going to her house, Boswells, which was very consciously modelled on Down House, Darwin’s house in Kent, which all the family revered. I’m one of 72 great grandchildren and there are … and he had ten children, six of them had a lot of children so there are a hell of a lot of us, I’m not alone.

I did Classics at Oxford, I did a PhD, I used to teach Greek at Oxford, and I remember looking after my grandmother, Nora Barlow, in Cambridge one rainy summer when I was doing my PhD and she asked me politely what I was working on. So I told her about emotions and Greek tragedy, how they were represented, and she responded by talking about Darwin on the expression of the emotions. And then of course she forgot what she’d said and what I’d said and she asked me again what I was doing, because she wanted to know what her granddaughter was working on. And I told her and she told me about something completely different also to do with Darwin. It was like talking to a very intelligent, drunk ghost who had memories, not of Charles Darwin directly, but who knew his work and his mind really, really well.

Birth of a Biography

I always wanted to write something about Charles and Emma ever since my grandmother, Nora Barlow, had talked about them and, this year. I was commissioned by the Bristol Festival of Ideas to write twenty poems about Darwin. And I thought “Okay, maybe I can do that.” And then the Natural History Museum commissioned me to write about the expression of the emotions for an exhibition that will happen in the second part of 2009 in London, in Kensington. And I began then to link his own expression of emotion as a child which came out, after his mother died, in collecting and in passion for natural history. I thought I could connect that to his book on the expression of emotion, that would be an interesting way to do that. And then I suddenly found I was writing a whole book.

It seemed natural that I could suddenly write what turned out to be a biography in poems.

Parallel journeys

For five years I - well, it took me five years - I journeyed around Asia into jungles, talking, going into jungles, forests with scientists and conservationists, asking them about the survival of tigers, what’s happening to wild tigers. And it was when I was in Laos, I took of course the Origin of Species with me and that was when I really first started to make a sort of parallel. I thought, "My God, he was going on his journey, a journey of understanding how species all fit together and evolve, I’m going on this journey, understanding how they disappear, how they go extinct," - because that is what wild tigers will do, go extinct.

And that’s one of the things I’ve tried to bring out in my book, Darwin, A Life In Poems, because it’s through extinctions that nature goes forward. That was one of Darwin's great insights and, of course, it was exacerbated for him in 1851 when his ten-year-old daughter, Annie, died. That gave his theory of the origin of species and the importance of extinctions a much more personal, bleaker twist.

When I was growing up, the books that we found at Boswells, my grandmother’s house, and also my mother’s books which we inherited, children’s books, there were a lot of them, were about animals or naturalists and I grew up with a natural idea that the naturalist or the animal was the hero of the story. There’s a kind of interest in looking at beetles under stones, if you like, knowing the names of the butterflies, knowing the name of the plant, of the name in the plant, which is part of my background automatically. There is a sort of meticulousness and working from detail which I think comes out of poems. I think poetry and science are very close.

People think of poetry as something very vague and loose but actually it isn’t, it’s very, very fierce and very precise and, you know, it’s not palliative, it’s not woolly. It is fierce, precise and exact, and you can’t be a good poet unless you’re not those things. And, you know, that is what a good scientist is, too.