Darwin: A Life in Poems [Hardcover]

Ruth Padel (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 31, 2009

This remarkable book brings us an intimate and moving interpretation of the life and work of Charles Darwin, by Ruth Padel, an acclaimed British poet and a direct descendant of the famous scientist.

Charles Darwin, born in 1809, lost his mother at the age of eight, repressed all memory of her, and poured his passion into solitary walks, newt collecting, and shooting. His five-year voyage on H.M.S. Beagle, when he was in his twenties, changed his life. Afterward, he began publishing his findings and working privately on groundbreaking theories about the development of animal species, including human beings, and he made a nervous proposal to his cousin Emma.

Padel’s poems sparkle with nuance and feeling as she shows us the marriage that ensued, and the rich, creative atmosphere the Darwins provided for their ten children. Charles and Emma were happy in each other, but both were painfully aware of the gulf between her deep Christian faith and his increasing religious doubt. The death of three of their children accentuated this gulf. For Darwin, death and extinction were nature’s way of developing new species: the survival of the fittest; for Emma, death was a prelude to the afterlife.

These marvelous poems—enriched by helpful marginal notes and by Padel’s ability to move among multiple viewpoints, always keeping Darwin at the center—bring to life the great scientist as well as the private man and tender father. This is a biography in rare form, with an unquantifiable depth of family intimacy and warmth.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

That Padel is Charles Darwin’s great-great-granddaughter adds the allure of curiosity to her contribution to observance of his natal bicentenary. That’s good, because appreciative readers of this year’s celebratory batch of new biographies and new editions of Darwin’s writings stand to be keenly affected by this superbly crafted book. Rather than rewrite the letters, journals, and memoirs of her forebear and his associates, Padel pours them, as verbatim as rhythm and lineation allow, into unrhymed verses and stanzas most often resembling classical Latin couplets but also arrayed in repeating three-, four-, and five-line units and as faux blank verse. Padel’s own original writing fleshes out narration and description, though she is sparing with it, letting the native rhythms of the prose of well-educated yet nonliterary nineteenth-century upper-middle-class people envelop us with their intelligent passion. If she omits a few important episodes—most notably his experiences at Tierra del Fuego during the Beagle’s voyage—she definitely gives us a Darwin with whom we can wonder and feel, smile and weep. --Ray Olson

Review

"Daring and exciting, brilliant and subtle, stunning and deeply impressive... a lesson to biographers and poets alike."
--Colm Toibin, author of The Master and Brooklyn

"Moments of Darwin's life captured with an economy and fluency that prosaic biographers might envy."
--Spectator

"Inspired... her poems are delicate, but with an unusual density.... Padel's subtle account is worthy of a fine novelist."
--The Times --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 160 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; First American Edition edition (March 31, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307272397
• ISBN-13: 978-0307272393
• Product Dimensions: 5.7 x 0.8 x 8.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #537,532 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Ruth Padel is an award-winning British poet and scholar, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Zoological Society of London. She started out as a Greek scholar and in the US is best-known in three areas: her books on ancient Greek ideas of mind; Darwin - A Life in Poems, her lyric biography of her great great grandfather Charles Darwin; and Tigers in Red Weather, her travel-memoir on tiger conservation. Ruth is acclaimed for her nature writing, in her novel, Where the Serpent Lives, her poetry and her tiger work, and her radio essays on british wildlife. Her latest collection, The Mara Crossing, mixes poetry, prose and science to put human immigration in the wider context of biology and history. "A major meditation on migration, a poet's book to the core and another innovative work from Ruth Padel: a passionate and at times elegiac exploration of her subject, which proves that external pressures on cells, bodies, creatures (human and other), or on the planet itself, are fit and essential matter for poetry," (Jo Shapcott) "A remarkable book, beautifully constructed, interleaving each chapter of clear prose with evocative poems. Who would have thought a famous poet would write about one of the most fascinating aspects of behavioural biology and human striving?" (Professor Sir Patrick Bateson FRS, President of the Zoological Society of London). See www.ruthpadel.com and @ruthpadel on Twitter

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Darwin: A Life in Poems, by Ruth Padel: An Engaging Read, May 5, 2010

By 

Laurel M. Church "Mateyrose" - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Darwin: A Life in Poems (Hardcover)

If you are knowledgeable about the life of Charles Darwin, if you know just a bit about Darwin, or if you want to learn about Darwin's life in a truly engaging series of linked poems, this is the book for you. Events of Darwin's life are told using a variety of poetic forms. I read and write poetry, but I would recommend this book even to those who generally steer clear of poetry. Ms. Padel, who is a great granddaughter of Charles Darwin, has done herself and her famous relative proud. Read it. You will enjoy the story and the way she presents it.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Why?, August 19, 2009

By 

Roger Brunyate "reader/writer/musician" (Baltimore, MD) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Darwin: A Life in Poems (Hardcover)

I am in a quandary about how to review this. Having recently read Rita Dove's SONATA MULATTICA, a speculative verse biography of the violinist who inspired Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata, I was interested in this unusual form. And distinguished British poet Ruth Padel, as a direct descendant of Darwin, has a special perspective to offer. A few days ago, I heard the author present her book at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, and am now working from a signed copy. Padel is a lively speaker, and her poems flowed in and out of the connecting narrative so smoothly that you often could not distinguish which was which; poetry or prose, it was all her voice. Printed on paper, you see a clear variety of stanzaic forms, but these are mainly visual; any devices of rhythm, rhyme, or assonance that might make these structures audible are subtle indeed. So unlike Rita Dove, whose virtuosity is always in the foreground and whose subject gives plenty of room for imagination and invention, you have to ask why Ruth Padel wrote a verse biography at all? Scarcely as a technical feat, given verse of such reticence. And certainly not to share much new information about a subject whose life, factually speaking, is already so well known.

The answer, I think, lies in the book's smallness: 141 sparsely-filled pages. To write it, Padel had to select. And in doing so, she gives it a personal perspective. It becomes a dialogue between a woman and her several-times-great grandfather, about matters of family life, faith, and obviously shared enthusiasms. Padel may not say much more about the "what" of Darwin, but she certainly tries to address his "why" and perhaps her own.

A major theme of the poems is Darwin's love for his wife Emma, the contrast between her Christianity and his gradual loss of faith, and his concern as the deaths of three of their children bring the theory of survival of the fittest to his own hearth. But the book is not all personal. Padel is also good at describing the discoveries that excited Darwin, and she treats with great sensitivity his relationship with Alfred Russel Wallace, who hit on the idea of natural selection independently to him.

All the same, the book might be better subtitled "NOTES on a Life...". I don't think it would work if you don't already know the main facts. For instance, Padel makes relatively little of the Beagle years, since these are so well served in both memoir (Darwin's own VOYAGE OF THE BEAGLE) and fiction (Roger McDonald's novel MR DARWIN'S SHOOTER is especially good at dealing with Darwin's discoveries and subsequent loss of faith). She does, however, annotate her verse freely with marginal notes, giving facts, dates, and citations. She also switches oddly in the poems themselves between factual exposition and personal imagination. The resultant shifts of tone, so effective when the poet was speaking, can have the effect of deflating the verse, making it seem jerky and short-breathed. Only a few of the poems have the sustained lyricism to get beyond this, so readers wanting an explanation of Padel's skyrocketing reputation in England might be better advised to choose one of her other collections, rather than starting with this peculiar hybrid.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Darwin's inner and outer weather, April 3, 2009

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BioDiplomacy "Iain" (London SE26, UK) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Darwin: A Life in Poems (Hardcover)

This touching and unusual tribute is to Emma as well as to Charles Darwin. It comes from their great-great granddaughter, Ruth Padel, and shows how Darwin's influence is still evolving in his bicentennial year. He lamented the loss in later life of his taste for poetry, strong when he was younger: Milton's "Paradise Lost" was one of the few books he took with him on HMS Beagle. But his poetic genes have resurfaced in this compelling "life in poems", a hybrid genre that might well catch on.


The family predisposition to natural history has already been seen in Padel's "The Soho Leopard " (2004 - poems) and "Tigers in Red Weather" (2005 - prose), the latter being her "extraordinary quest for the tiger in its forest home and in the human imagination" (Helen Dunmore). Here, poet and naturalist are in harmony as she recreates the effect on Darwin of the tropical rainforest:

"Leaves of all textures that a leaf
could be: palm, fluff, prickle, matte and plume;
bobbled; shaggy plush. A thousand shades
of ochre, silver, emerald, smoky brass.
He's walking into every dream he's ever seen."


Many of the poems are partially "found", full of phrases straight from Darwin or others. An additional narrative thread is provided by notes running down the side of most poems, as well as by evocative titles: "A Quarrel in Bahia Harbour" shows Darwin making his opposition to slavery clear to Captain Fitzroy; "A Spot of Malaria in the Moluccas" leads into the fateful letter showing Darwin that Alfred Russel Wallace had also realised the mechanism by which species could change.


Poetry is often internal, the biogeography of emotions; while "biography is about chaps". Here, the inner Darwin is seen at key moments coming to terms with his external persona as devoted husband and father, local dignitary in Downe village, and the Victorian scientist planting intellectual timebombs. You'll get here to the place even good prose biographers seldom reach - the man through his own eyes.