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and have fundamental consequences for how we understand ourselves as a species, our place in nature, and nature itself, including its continual coming into being and the spiritual significance it may or may not hold. What Ryan shows us is that, to understand the first, freshest and most intense wave of responses to Darwinism we need to recognize the central importance of Wordsworth’s poetry within Victorian culture. In the process he opens up opportunities for rich investigations into the history of evolutionary thinking both within and beyond science. Scientists, particularly Victorian scientists, do not exist in isolation, and nor does their science. With Ryan’s discoveries in hand, historians of science and literature may now go on to re-examine the diversity of evolutionary theories in the late 1800s, to see what part the poetic and religious vision offered by Wordsworth may have played in scientists’ interpretations of and even their formulation of their own science. At the same time, drawing on his example, we can press on further in exploring how other poets, most prominently Shelley, Tennyson and Browning, provided alternative visions of nature and humanity that gained currency under the new evolutionary dispensation. Ryan rounds off his book with one further chapter. In chapter 5, he shows in detail how Wordsworth’s poetry works as poetry to form within its readers a sense of the spiritual significance of their own individual experiences of nature. Taken with the book as a whole, Ryan’s close readings of Wordsworth’s poetic strategies here are a masterful demonstration of how literary criticism, as well as a knowledge of literary culture, can advance our understanding of the history of science and its ramifications. In reading Wordsworth’s poems under Ryan’s tutelage, we come to see how and why they were able to exert such extraordinary influence in the nineteenth century, and how they can still shape our responses to nature today.