How Charles Darwin's grandfather prophesied the theory of evolution in his poetry

One should read a little poetry everyday.

Very interesting as a Artie Johnson dressed a German soldier used to intone on Laugh-in my friend PO1 Tony Holland

Here is the initial verse of the poem for the article you posted
"Organic life beneath the shoreless waves
Was born and nurs’d in Ocean’s pearly caves;
First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,
Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;
These, as successive generations bloom,
New powers acquire, and larger limbs assume;
Whence countless groups of vegetation spring,
And breathing realms of fin and feet and wing.

This verse demonstrates the prescience of the imaginative arts, how poetic dreams can foreshadow empirical reality. Fair to admit that Erasmus’s contributions lacked the specificity of his grandson, and that evolutionary thinking goes back to antiquity, but this was a novel way to anticipate natural selection. Poetry has unrealised potential, not just in celebrating and describing nature, but also as an integral way of thinking about nature.

In The Genius of Erasmus Darwin (2005), C U M Smith and Robert Arnott describe the physician, naturalist and poet as ‘the English Leonardo’. Yet this Darwin often merits simply a footnote in his grandson’s biography. In The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin: Enlightened Spaces, Romantic Times (2013), Martin Priestman quips that ‘few writers can be so burdened with a surname which so clearly belongs to someone else’. While the younger Darwin provided the scientific mechanism for evolution – and a cursory reading of On the Origin of Species (1859) demonstrates that he was an adept stylist – his grandfather did accomplish something exemplary. Charles enumerated the details of evolution, but Erasmus anticipated its broad outlines; the younger Darwin wrote in prose, and the elder imagined in poetry, arguably the most significant scribbler of scientific verse in English, a sadly neglected genre.

Erasmus Darwin’s reputation rested on his biological text Zoonomia (1794-96), his radical politics, which encompassed abolitionism and women’s suffrage, and his poetry in The Botanic Garden (1791), where he popularised Carl Linnaeus’s system of biological classification, doing for him what Alexander Pope did for Isaac Newton. But The Temple of Nature, an epic about the history of the Universe, was his masterpiece. Desmond King-Hele, whose biography Erasmus Darwin: A Life of Unequalled Achievement (1999) remains the standard, claims that his was the ‘greatest imaginative construct in the history of the world, because he was the first person to arrive at and fully express and expound a nearly correct view of the development of life on Earth’.
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Interesting man!