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Ralph Windle’s Blog on Science & The Arts

is about some big, interconnected issues:-

The long-running Arts / Science / Two cultures Debate. Why the old clichés have to STOP...

How Creative Synthesis - the bringing together of separated (Arts/Science?) modes of thought is now top-priority for Innovation...

About Ralph Windle

Upon a Peak in Darien… New Vistas from Old Places

Gradually we are sorting through the many and welcome initiatives on the Arts/Science interaction front which the 2009 coincidence of the Darwin and Two Cultures anniversaries has stimulated.

What, if anything, has happened which will endure into 2010 and beyond, when the media have turned elsewhere and the VIPs who have graced the scene move on to other conferences and sound-bites? What remain the key issues and how far, after this welcome spotlight of attention, are they now likely to be addressed?  CVN has been be preparing a status report on the more important initiatives and on the agenda of priorities for the next phase of the Arts/Science Interaction debate.

One thing is for sure, however, and it’s a great joy to comment on it today. Without doubt, one of the most astonishing, unintended and welcome outcomes of a heady year’s debates has been the now-irreversible re-positioning of what we have so-long labelled ‘The Romantic Poets’ in the historical, intellectual and literary accounts of the run-up to Darwin and the break-through of Science.

For, science apart, this should have a profound impact on the way we, and generations of teachers, have introduced our children to the main corpus of our ‘great poets’ work –Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge and others – bringing them in from the inaccessibly ‘sublime’ to the inspirationally immediate and relevant. Think what this could do to re-animate some of the bored and not-of-this-world attitudes to poetry in our societies! We can see, so much more clearly, what kind of images jostled in Keats’ mind as he wrote the words we’ve parroted, with little conviction, since early school …

                          Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
                        When a new planet swims into his ken;
                     Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
                        He star’d at the Pacific –and all his men
                     Looked at each other with a wild surmise –
                        Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

They are the more pertinent, memorable, but no less beautiful .

There is little doubt that we owe much of this exhilarating reappraisal to Ashton Nichols ( whose 2004 ‘Romantic Natural Histories’ I have commented on before*); and to Richard Holmes’( ‘The Age of Wonder’ 2008) who made a brilliant appearance at one of Sheffield University’s impressive ‘Arts/Science Encounters’ earlier this year.

Tucked away in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society is the text of Nichols’ masterly 2004 summation of the argument, entitled -with his characteristic wit and flair – “Roaring Alligators and Burning Tygers: Poetry and Science from William Bartram to Charles Darwin ”!  *

He reminds us that ‘ …Darwin’s theory was the culmination of decades of scientific speculation about connections between human beings and nonhuman nature…These ideas were reflected not only in the work of natural scientists, philosophers and theologians, but also in the images of poets, novelists and visual artists’ …

‘Wordsworth corresponded with Humphrey Davy, while Davy was making a number of his most significant chemical discoveries: electrolysis, magnesium, nitrogen, and nitrous oxide (laughing gas) which Davy tried out on Samuel Taylor Coleridge and others … the poet Coleridge was attending almost every lecture on physiology being offered at the time in London. When asked why he went to so many scientific meetings, he replied “To increase my stock of metaphors ”. Percy Shelley experimented with chemicals in his rooms at Oxford …’ and so on. *

So poetry, which many of these early natural scientists themselves wrote ( Davy, Priestley, Erasmus Darwin and others) was in the very thick of it, not on the Elysian heights or at the Olympian extremities. We need some important ‘re-writes’ of the standard ‘Companions to English Literature’ under ‘Romanticism’ to correct their emphasis on ‘the sense of the infinite and the transcendental’ ( OUP 1987 et al) and the pseudo-deification of their muse.

So there is much gain as we move on. And note the tongue-in-cheek Coleridge reply above. The stock of metaphors – moving both ways between science and the arts – is one of the key elements in the ‘creative synthesis’ which Koestler and others lobbied for. It’s very important; but it’s another story to which we’ll come.

* read 22 April 2004 at symposium ‘Science,Art and Knowledge.Practicing Natural History from the Enlightenment to the 21st Century’.

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*Postscript:  click on ’The PEST Anthology’ for the latest additions to the Poetry of Engineering, Science and Technology anthology.