Victorian Poetry

7

DANIEL BROWN

Victorian poetry and science

i

In the 1802 "Preface" to Lyrical Ballads, William Wordsworth states that
"Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned
expression which is in the countenance of all Science." 1 In other words, he
presents poetry as an informing principle: a "breath" or "spirit" that gives
contingent physical attributes, the discrete facts of science, an identifiable
face. Although many Continental scientists of the time - notably the
German Naturphilosophen - shared this Romantic metaphysic, the strong
tradition of British empiricism was far less receptive to it. The economic
and technological successes of the Industrial Revolution vindicated the type
of empiricist research based upon sensory experience and practical experi-
ment that Francis Bacon had theorized in the early seventeenth century.
Doctrines of positivism, which maintain that the information which science
extracts from sense-perception is the only nonanalytic knowledge possible,
exercised a powerful influence over British intellectual life from the middle
of the nineteenth century onward. They led science to break its traditional
ties to philosophy and religion and to emerge as the paradigmatic form of
knowledge. Poetry enters the Victorian era endowed by Romanticism with
a metaphysical and cultural authority that it struggles to preserve in the
face of such scientism. The present chapter explores the ways in which a
range of poems reify, reinflect, or reject both this familiar narrative of
combat and contrasting fortunes, and its ideological underpinning: namely,
the hierarchical distinction between poetry and science that Wordsworth
asserts in his "Preface."

An episode from the early 1860s helps to focus what was at stake in the
conflict between poetry and science during the Victorian period. Here is the
physicist John Tyndall's account of a Spiritualist seance that he attended:

The spirits were requested to spell the name by which I am known in the

heavenly world. Our host commenced repeating the alphabet, and when he

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