TY - CHAP

T1 - Introduction

AU - Ruston, Sharon

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2013, Sharon Ruston.

PY - 2013/5/29

Y1 - 2013/5/29

N2 - In a notebook kept around the time that he worked on his safety lamp (circa 1815), the invention that would be praised for the countless lives it saved in British mines, Humphry Davy writes the following: Those brilliant and poetical works in which enthusiasm takes place of reason, and in which the human intellect exhausts itself, as it were, in imagination and feeling, resemble monstrous flowers, brilliant and odorous, but affording no materials of re-production(Collected Works, I, 212)1 He is writing of a particular kind of poetry here perhaps, rather than poetry in general, but there is further evidence in the notebooks for Davy’s coming to distinguish between poetry and science in these ways.2 For example, comparing Shakespeare to Bacon and Milton to Newton around 1805, Davy writes: ‘The object of poetry, whatever may be said by poets, is more to amuse than to instruct; the object of science more to instruct than amuse’ (Collected Works, I, 147). It is important to keep in mind the fact that, notwithstanding such views, Davy himself wrote poetry throughout his life, but it does seem that he valued chemistry more highly for these reasons.

AB - In a notebook kept around the time that he worked on his safety lamp (circa 1815), the invention that would be praised for the countless lives it saved in British mines, Humphry Davy writes the following: Those brilliant and poetical works in which enthusiasm takes place of reason, and in which the human intellect exhausts itself, as it were, in imagination and feeling, resemble monstrous flowers, brilliant and odorous, but affording no materials of re-production(Collected Works, I, 212)1 He is writing of a particular kind of poetry here perhaps, rather than poetry in general, but there is further evidence in the notebooks for Davy’s coming to distinguish between poetry and science in these ways.2 For example, comparing Shakespeare to Bacon and Milton to Newton around 1805, Davy writes: ‘The object of poetry, whatever may be said by poets, is more to amuse than to instruct; the object of science more to instruct than amuse’ (Collected Works, I, 147). It is important to keep in mind the fact that, notwithstanding such views, Davy himself wrote poetry throughout his life, but it does seem that he valued chemistry more highly for these reasons.

KW - Deep Passion

KW - Literary Creation

KW - Literary Metaphor

KW - Prose Work

KW - Romantic Period

U2 - 10.1057/9781137264299_1

DO - 10.1057/9781137264299_1

M3 - Chapter

AN - SCOPUS:85146094545

SN - 9781349442959

T3 - Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print

SP - 1

EP - 27

BT - Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print

PB - Palgrave Macmillan

CY - London

ER -