Birdsong, Speech and Poetry

"In the long nineteenth century, scientists revealed striking similarities between how birds learn to sing and how children learn to speak. This book explores how poets in this period responded to an analogy which challenged established definitions of language and, consequently, of what it means to be human. Tracing the 'science of birdsong' as it developed from the ingenious experiments of Daines Barrington to the evolutionary arguments of Charles Darwin, the first two chapters reveal a legacy of thought which informs, and consequently affords fresh insights into, a canonical group of poems about birdsong in the Romantic and Victorian periods. Focusing especially on the writings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the Wordsworth siblings, John Clare and Thomas Hardy, the remaining chapters explore how these writers used birdsong as an analogy through which to explore the faculty of language: how language is learned and how it may have evolved, and what this may further tell us about how poets compose. Drawing together responses to birdsong in science, music and poetry, this interdisciplinary approach examines and tests many of the deep-rooted assumptions which have shaped (and continue to shape) how we respond to the sounds and songs of other creatures in the Anthropocene"--