Darwin’s Descendant, on Origin of Poetry

The British poet Ruth Padel, a favorite to be named the Oxford Professor of Poetry this spring, is Charles Darwin’s great-great-granddaughter, though for much of her life she has preferred not to dwell on the connection.

"A feature of Darwins is that they’re quite reticent,” she said last week during a visit to New York that included a stop at the American Museum of Natural History.
Her new book, however, just out in the United States, is called “Darwin: A Life in Poems” (Alfred A. Knopf), timed to coincide with his bicentenary this year, and it’s a verse biography of her celebrated ancestor that reads at times like a family album. Many of the poems embed Darwin’s own words, taken from his books, letters and notebooks and annotated with marginal commentary resembling that in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”