Indoor studies - 1895 Author:John Burroughs Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: m SCIENCE AND THE POETS TT is interesting to note to what extent the lead- ing literary men of our time have been influenced by science, or have availed th... more »emselves of its results. A great many of them not at all, it would seem. Among our own writers, Bryant, Irving, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Whittier, show little or no trace of the influence of science. The later English poets, Arnold, Swinburne, Rossetti, do not appear to have profited by science. There is no science in Rossetti, unless it be a kind of dark, forbidden science, or science in league with sorcery. Rossetti's muse seems to have been drugged with an opiate that worked inversely and made it morbidly wakeful instead of somnolent. The air of his "House of Life" is close, and smells not merely of midnight oil, but of things much more noxious and suspicious. Byron, Shelley, Keats, Landor seem to have owed little or nothing directly to science; Coleridge and Wordsworth probably more, though with them the debt was inconsiderable. Wordsworth's great ode shows no trace of scientific knowledge. Yet Wordsworth was certainly an interested observer ofthe scientific progress of his age, and was the first to indicate the conditions under which the poet could avail himself of the results of physical science. "The Poet," he says, "writes under one restriction only, namely, that of the necessity of giving immediate pleasure to a human Being possessed of that information which may be expected from him, not as a lawyer, a physician, a mariner, an astronomer, or a natural philosopher, but as a Man." "The knowledge both of the Poet and the Man of Science," he again says, "is pleasure: but the knowledge of the one cleaves to us as a necessary part of our existence, our natural and unalienable inheritance; the other, as a personal and ...« less