Four Augustan Science Poets: Abraham Cowley, James Thomson, Henry Brooke, Erasmus Darwin

By Richard Hillyer

Focusing on four poets who because of their distinctive profiles illustrate especially well the opportunities and pitfalls of writing science poetry during the long eighteenth century “Four Augustan Science Poets: Abraham Cowley, James Thomson, Henry Brooke, Erasmus Darwin” offers numerous close readings that shed light not only on standard versions of the sublime but also on these idiosyncratic variants: the apologetic (Abraham Cowley), the illicit (James Thomson), the perverse (Henry Brooke) and the atheistic (Erasmus Darwin).

Recurrent concerns include the similarities and differences among the languages of poetry, science and religion. Of the poets analyzed all but Thomson wrote extensive notes to accompany their lines, permitting further comparison of languages, in this case between the same authors’ poetry and prose.

Topics covered include the Royal Society, the scientific revolution, astronomy, botany, chemistry, telescopy, microscopy, the anthropic principle, the clockwork universe, evolution, intelligent design, comets, meteors, light, the aurora borealis, the sun, the moon, the milky way, analogies, mimetic prosody, poetic diction and the value to poetry or science of fable and myth.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Apr 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781785272936

Book preview

Four Augustan Science Poets: Abraham Cowley, James Thomson, Henry Brooke, Erasmus Darwin

Four Augustan Science Poets: Abraham Cowley, James Thomson, Henry Brooke, Erasmus Darwin

Richard Hillyer

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2020

by ANTHEM PRESS

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Copyright © Richard Hillyer 2020

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019955638

ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-291-2 (Pbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78527-291-8 (Pbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgments

1. Scientifick Versification

2. The Sage-Instructed Eye

3. Wondrous Facts

4. The Mind of Man

Works Cited

Index

PREFACE

A prior study of mine demonstrated how poets and scientists during the long eighteenth century discovered for their respective endeavors a new significance in the keyword care.¹ Whereas I judged and presented these developments as largely unrelated, reading such material heightened my interest in the same era’s science poetry. As a result, the following pages analyze the work of four Augustan science poets discussed in chronological order, one chapter apiece. I focus on this quartet because each member has a distinctive profile, best understood in relation to Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society (1667). The resultant compass points illustrate especially well both the opportunities and pitfalls of writing science poetry, at least during the Augustan era.

In an account published just five years after the Royal Society’s chartering, Sprat recognized that he wrote "not altogether in the way of a plain History, but somtimes of an Apology, aiming to counter the Objections and Cavils raised by two groups of Detractors."² "While some over-zealous Divines do reprobate Natural Philosophy, as a carnal knowledge, and a too much minding worldly things, he explained, the men of the World, and business on the other side, esteem it meerly as an idle matter of Fancy, and as that which disables us, from taking right measures in humane affairs.³ As the phrase carnal knowledge might suggest, the Royal Society’s founding gave fresh impetus to the sort of grumbling exemplified by an entry that Samuel Butler made in his commonplace book (ca. 1665–77): Adam might have liv’d still in Paradice, if he could have been contented, to know no more, then God and Nature had allow’d him."⁴ But the same author in his unfinished [Satyr on the Royal Society] also captures the predominant tenor of antagonism toward this institution, listing among self-evidently absurd investigations "To measure Wind, and weigh the Air.⁵ Swift, Pope and many others both had and created great fun mocking the ludicrous antics of miscellaneous experimenters and collectors of curiosities. The claim that rejecters of Fancy proved far more prominent and numerous than over-zealous Divines will perhaps seem incredible in light of the sweeping change documented by Richard Westfall: In 1600, Western civilization found its focus in the Christian religion; by 1700, modern natural science had displaced religion from its central position.⁶ As Westfall clarifies, however, this larger and total displacement accumulated from subsidiary displacements effected not only by sincerely pious thinkers but also of a kind too subtle to cause widespread alarm: general providence was displacing particular providence;⁷ natural religion was meant to supplement Christianity, to provide it with a rational basis, but in practice […] tended to displace it.⁸ Thus, and though not by sly intention, the virtuosi introduced significant innovations into Christianity.⁹ In short, the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century increasingly supplanted religious belief without initially seeming to threaten it at all. Whereas many scholars dispute that such a revolution occurred in England during the seventeenth century I agree with Steven Weinberg’s witty assessment. Acknowledging how Herbert Butterfield coined the phrase ‘the Whig interpretation of history’ […] to criticize historians who judge the past according to its contribution to our present enlightened practices, Weinberg explains that when it came to the scientific revolution, Butterfield was thoroughly Whiggish, as am I.¹⁰ More timidly, Roy Porter’s Culture of Science incorporates a note placating deniers of the scientific revolution because whether what happened amounted to a ‘revolution’ does not affect the argument of this chapter.¹¹ But the very emergence of such a Culture" during the long eighteenth century can only mean that the Royal Society soon exerted a transformative impact beyond its own walls. Against this backdrop, Henry Brooke stands out for displaying a firm command of science while condemning it from a Christian perspective as merely the most recent expression of humans’ incorrigible pride. Accordingly, he wrote science poetry hostile to science.

Often disparaged as a mere hack, Sprat in his History displayed a good understanding of why the Royal Society’s founding represented an event of great historical significance; even more impressively he grasped some of what lay ahead for it.¹² As a platform moving underfoot, science since Sprat’s day has exhibited a slipperiness that nonetheless proves dependable for reasons likewise cited by Jacques Barzun: Because the method was sure and the results covered an ever-wider area of the unknown or misknown.¹³ Paradoxically, note Andrew Barnaby and Lisa Schnell, the very limitations of a perpetually provisional knowledge provide the foundation on which stable, legitimate public authority can be established: the institutionalization of probable knowledge.¹⁴ But Sprat sometimes exaggerated the degree to which the Royal Society had already achieved a momentous break with the past, as when ignoring the routine prolixity of Robert Boyle’s writing to characterize its members’ stylistic aims as a close, naked, natural way of speaking; positive expressions; clear senses; a native easiness: bringing all things as near the Mathematical plainness, as they can: and preferring the language of Artizans, Countrymen, and Merchants, before that, of Wits, or Scholars.¹⁵ Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse view Sprat as an important figure in establishing the category that they call intellectual labor, noting that he (like William Petty) identified the domain of rational truth with the artisan—his city, his nature, his body, his discourse, his labor.¹⁶ Notwithstanding the leveling implications of such claims, even a genius of Robert Hooke’s caliber remained highly conscious of his humble background as a mere mechanic compared with the more well-heeled majority among his fellow scientists: when dedicating Micrographia (1665) to Charles II he could characterize himself as presenting "that which is more proportionable to the smallness of my Abilities in some of the least of all visible things, similarly conjoining as two disadvantages, the meanness of the Author, and of the Subject.¹⁷ As Sprat foresaw, however, science would develop by moving both toward Mathematical plainness and away from not only the rhetorical habits but also the entire worldview traditionally associated with Wits, or Scholars." By contrast, James Thomson insistently affiliated himself with contemporary scientists as elite connoisseurs appreciating natural phenomena in a manner impossible for the ill-educated masses. Thus, he could confidently produce science poetry by combining his gift for description with the investigations of researchers whom he regarded as like-minded peers. With respect to a phenomenon still mysterious, he nonetheless found he had no option except to draw on the despised perspective of hoi polloi, so identifying a whole dimension on which his poetry could not operate in tandem with science.

In another of his pronouncements about the Royal Society’s capacity for linguistic innovation, Sprat explained that its members "have indeavor’d, to separate the knowledge of Nature, from the colours of Rhetorick, the devices of Fancy, or the delightful deceit of Fables."¹⁸ For Basil Willey, these aims reveal authors determined to declare war on poetry.¹⁹ Of course, they had no such end in view when seeking the most appropriate medium for the particular needs of scientific discourse. The true heir of Sprat’s supposed ‘war upon poetry’ must patently be William Wordsworth, not the Augustans, who scorned the Royal Society, remarks Henry Knight Miller, rejecting Willey’s claim and its implications but also forgetting the long eighteenth century’s science poets.²⁰ Though Willey appears to write more in sorrow than in anger, the animus against all poetry that he attributes to early scientists he himself directs against both any kind of science and Augustan poetry in particular. More recent expressions of hostility toward science have, of course, taken a very different form, usually without concern for poetry. According to John Neubauer,

It has become fashionable for humanists and social scientists to talk about science as just another mode of discourse, propelled by its rhetoric and by the social organization of its practitioners, being, ultimately, a nonreferential, constructed reality comparable to the arts. This view belittles science’s ability to manipulate nature and asserts that science is defined by its unique authority relation, i.e., by the fact that scientific statements must be certified by the discourse community that has assumed the guardianship of science.²¹

But R. L. Brett well summarizes an earlier form of incomprehension that has exerted enormous influence:

Such writers as A. N. Whitehead, Basil Willey and Douglas Bush have all made the point that the mechanical view of the world is one that does not commend itself to the poet. Its declaration that what is really real, is a world of atoms in motion, devoid of all secondary sense qualities, such as colour, scent, taste and sound, ordered by causal laws and explicable only in terms of mathematics, is one that gives little status to the poet.²²

In his multifaceted challenge to the tradition evoked here, Donald Davie can approve even Augustan poetry affiliated with science because he does not start by presuming it part of a dead corpus murdered by an implacable foe. He thus cites an advantage of Latinate diction: A poet […] could use this device […] to bring his poetic observation into line with scientific observation (as Thomson does, often).²³ In part because he swims against such a powerful post-Romantic tide, however, Davie cannot avoid sometimes sounding defensive: when Wordsworth […] declared that there was no essential difference between the languages of poetry and prose, he was enunciating a principle from which had come the very vocabulary he objected to;²⁴ There is a notion abroad that what is ‘organic’ is a good thing for poetry, so it follows that what is mechanical isn’t.²⁵ On this last point, Marjorie Hope Nicolson ignores a great deal of evidence (much of it made available by superior studies she herself wrote) when claiming of the seventeenth century that the animate macrocosm and living microcosm disappeared, and their places were taken by a mechanical clock and men with mechanical hearts,²⁶ so that, for instance, Harvey won most acclaim not during his lifetime but in Restoration England (as capable of thinking in terms of mechanical hearts as of mechanical universes).²⁷ Such ultimately trivial wordplay oversimplifies a complex picture epitomized by Abraham Cowley, who alone in his time made poetry coextensive with "the colours of Rhetorick, the devices of Fancy, or the delightful deceit of Fables," alternatively attacking and defending it on that very point and while writing poems acclaiming the scientific revolution.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, Erasmus Darwin embraced Fables as both delightful in themselves and a vehicle not for deceit but for the transmission of scientific insight from ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome to the Enlightenment culture of his own day and place. In assigning such temporally and geographically remote origins to the scientific revolution of seventeenth-century England, he most directly contradicts I. A. Richards’s account of "the Neutralization of Nature or the transference from the Magical View of the world to the scientific."²⁸ Richards characterizes the Magical View as

roughly, the belief in a world of Spirits and Powers which control events, and which can be evoked and, to some extent, controlled themselves by human practices. The belief in Inspiration and the beliefs underlying Ritual are representative parts of this view. It has been decaying slowly for some 300 years, but its definite overthrow has taken place only in the last 60. Vestiges and survivals of it prompt and direct a great part of our daily affairs, but it is no longer the world-picture which an informed mind most easily accepts.²⁹

Having risked offending many Christians among his readers by classifying their faith as both so belated and indistinguishable from other manifestations of the Magical View, Richards then makes a surprising concession: There is some evidence that Poetry, together with the other Arts, arose with this Magic view. It is a possibility to be seriously considered that Poetry may pass away with it.³⁰ Richards thus retreats toward entertaining as imaginable the scenario that Willey and company assume as certain: that religion and poetry will stand or fall together as upholders of so-called spiritual values assuredly menaced by science but not otherwise subject to definition. So woozy an affiliation invites the