Since the first publication of On the Origin of Species 150 years ago, Charles Darwin's ideas and the discipline of biology founded upon them have changed our understanding of the natural world and our place within it radically and definitively. As a discourse, Darwinism has transformed Western culture. More fundamentally, it has transformed nature as we apprehend it. The sciences of palaeontology, ecology, ethology, evolutionary biology and genetics through which we understand the natural world are all Darwinian sciences. The processes of Darwinism – genetic mutation and recombination, natural and sexual selection – are the processes of biological creation by which, in the last words of Darwin's book, ‘endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved’ ([1859] 2003: 398). We ourselves are one of these forms, one twig on the tree of life, to use Darwin's own image.

Darwin himself has been dead for well over a century, yet his thinking has never been more vital nor more contentious than it is today. Now more than ever, with fundamentalism on the rise and ecosystems changing and collapsing around us on a global scale, we need to understand where Darwin's discoveries leave us, to feel for ourselves what it means to live in, to be born of, a Darwinian world. In this book I will be arguing that poetry has a unique and important role to play in helping us to reach that accommodation with Darwinism.