George Gordon, Lord Byron 

Byron may have referred to Erasmus Darwin as "that mighty master of unmeaning rhyme" ("English Bards and Scotch Reviewers" [1809]), but Byron's poetry helped to construct a version of the natural world that affected readers throughout the nineteenth-century. His extensive travels brought him into contact with parts of the world that were little known to most Europeans before they read Byron's verse descriptions, and his wry cynicism often led him to compare human beings (unfavorably) with lower forms of life. Byron was also a master of descriptive, and satiric, language that connected the animal kingdom with human affairs, as in this extract from his journal for 14 November 1813 recounting a visit to the Exeter 'Change Menagerie in the Strand in London: 

Two nights ago I saw the tigers sup at Exeter 'Change. Except Veli Pacha's lion in  the Morea,--who followed the Arab keeper like a dog,--the fondness of the hyaena for her keeper amused me most. Such a conversazione! -- There was a "hippopotamus," like Lord L[iverpoo]l in the face; and the "Ursine Sloth" hath the very voice and manner of my valet--but the tiger talked too much. The elephant (see Chunee) took and gave me my money again--took off my hat--opened a door-- trunked a whip--and behaved so well, that I wish he was my butler. The handsomest animal on earth is one of the panthers; but the poor antelopes were dead. I should hate to see one here:--the sight of the camel made me pine again for Asia Minor.

One of Byron's most often quoted lyrics was the epitaph he penned for his Newfoundland dog Boatswain which includes these misanthorpic, if naturalistic and heartfelt, lines: 

          . . . the poor dog, in life the firmest friend,
          The first to welcome, the foremost to defend,
          Whose honest heart is still his master's own,
          Who labors, fights, lives, breathes for him alone,
          Unhonored falls, unnoticed all his worth,
          Denied in heaven the soul he held on earth.
          While man, vain insect, hopes to be forgiven,
          And claims himself a sole, exclusive heaven.
          Oh man! thou feeble tenant of an hour,
          Debas'd by slavery, or corrupt by power,
          Who knows thee well must quit thee with disgust,
          Degraded mass of animated dust!
          Thy love is lust, thy friendship all a cheat,
          Thy tongue hypocrisy, thy heart deceit,
          By nature vile, ennobled but by name,
          Each kindred brute might bid thee blush for shame.
          Ye! Who behold perchance this simple urn,
          Pass on, it honours none you wish to mourn.
          To mark a friend's remains these stones arise,
          I never knew but one - and here he lies.

Conversations with Byron and Percy Shelley led Mary Shelley to the dream that became the genesis of Frankenstein. Byron's satiric and often cynical attitude may be closer to the courtly nuances of Pope than the woodland wilds of Wordsworth, but his careful attention to the details of his surroundings was an essential part of the rhetoric of poetic naturalism that pervaded the nineteenth century.

Byron links:

Byron on the natural world (poetry and prose extracts) 

Childe Harold, Canto III (the Wordsworthian influence) 

Byron and the Frankenstein summer

 

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