THE INFLUENCE OF THE SCIENTIFIC 

 MOVEMENT ON MODERN POETRY 



By E. A. FISHER 



Balliol College, Oxford ; and S.E. Agricultural College, Wye 



11 Poetry," says Leigh Hunt, " is the utterance of a passion for 

 truth, beauty, and power, embodying and illustrating its con- 

 ceptions by imagination and fancy, and modulating its language 

 on the principle of variety in uniformity. Its means are what- 

 ever the Universe contains ; and its ends, pleasure and exaltation. 

 Poetry stands between nature and convention, keeping alive 

 among us the enjoyment of the external and the spiritual worlds ; 

 and, next to Love and Beauty, which are its parents, is the 

 greatest proof to man of the pleasure to be found in all things, 

 and of the probable riches of infinitude. . . . Poetry," he con- 

 tinues, '! begins where matters of fact or of science cease to be 

 merely such, and it exhibits a further truth ; that is, the connec- 

 tion science has with the world of emotion, and its power of 

 producing imaginative pleasure. Inquiring of a gardener, for 

 instance, what flower it is we see yonder, he answers, ' a lily.' 

 This is a matter of fact. The botanist pronounces it to be of the 

 order Hexandria monogynia. This is a matter of science. It is 

 the 'lady' of the garden, says Spenser; and here we begin to 

 have a poetical sense of its fairness and grace. It is ' the plant 

 and flower of light,' says Ben Jonson ; and poetry then shows us 

 the beauty of the flower in all its mystery and splendour." This 

 was written some eighty years ago, when science was in its 

 infancy, or rather in that embryo stage in which all science is 

 purely descriptive, but it shows us clearly enough that, even in 

 those early days of scientific thought, the best literary minds of the 

 time saw clearly that in matters of poetry, as in matters of fact 

 and of science, we see " the same feet of nature treading in 

 different ways " ; that the most scornful and dullest disciple of 

 fact should be cautious how he betrays the shallowness of his 

 philosophy by discerning no poetry in its depths. It is indeed 



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