Nineteenth-Century Poetry and the Physical Sciences

Poetical Matter

Gregory Tate

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030314408
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030314415
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Poetical Matter examines the two-way exchange of language and methods between nineteenth-century poetry and the physical sciences. The book argues that poets such as William Wordsworth, Mathilde Blind, and Thomas Hardy identified poetry as an experimental investigation of nature's materiality. It also explores how science writers such as Humphry Davy, Mary Somerville, and John Tyndall used poetry to formulate their theories, to bestow cultural legitimacy on the emerging disciplines of chemistry and physics, and to communicate technical knowledge to non-specialist audiences. The book's chapters show how poets and science writers relied on a set of shared terms ("form," "experiment," "rhythm," "sound," "measure") and how the meaning of those terms was debated and reimagined in a range of different texts.

"A stimulating analysis of nineteenth-century poetry and physics. In this groundbreaking

study, Tate turns to sound to tease out fascinating continuities across

scientific inquiry and verse. Reflecting that 'the processes of the universe' were

themselves 'rhythmic,' he shows that a wide range of poets and scientists were

thinking through undulatory motion as a space where the material and the immaterial

met. 'The motion of waves,' Tate demonstrates, was 'the exemplary form in

the physical sciences.' Sound waves, light, energy, and poetic meter were each

characterized by a 'process of undulation,' that could be understood as both a

physical and a formal property. Drawing on work in new materialism and new

formalism, Tate illuminates a nineteenth-century preoccupation with dynamic patterning

that characterizes the undulatory as (in John Herschel's words) not 'things,

but forms.'"

—Anna Henchman, Associate Professor of English at Boston University, USA

"This impressive study consolidates and considerably advances the field of physics

and poetry studies. Moving easily and authoritatively between canonical and scientist

poets, Nineteenth-Century Poetry and the Physical Sciences draws scientific

thought and poetic form into telling relation, disclosing how they were understood

variously across the nineteenth century as both comparable and competing

ways of knowing the physical world. Clearly written and beautifully structured,

Nineteenth-Century Poetry and the Physical Sciences is both scholarly and accessible,

a fascinating and indispensable contribution to its field."

—Daniel Brown, Professor of English at the University of Southampton, UK

"Essential reading for Victorianists. Tate's study of nineteenth-century poetry and

science reconfi gures debate by insisting on the equivalence of accounts of

empirical fact and speculative theory rather than their antagonism. The

undulatory rhythms of the universe and of poetry, the language of science and of

verse, come into newrelations. Tate brilliantly re-reads Coleridge, Tennyson,

Mathilde Blind and Hardy through their explorations of matter and ontological

reality. He also addresses contemporary theory from Latour to Jane Bennett."

— Isobel Armstrong, Emeritus Professor of English at Birkbeck, University of London, UK

© The Author(s) 2020

G. TateNineteenth-Century Poetry and the Physical SciencesPalgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicinehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31441-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Gregory Tate¹

(1)

School of English, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, UK

Gregory Tate

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

In the early 1920s Thomas Hardy started using a notebook which he titled “Poetical Matter I (That has not been experimented on).” The notebook consisted of transcriptions and cuttings of various “old notes of many years ago”: lists of possible titles for volumes of verse; discussions of metre and rhyme; detailed drafts of some poems; and a range of fragmentary observations and scenarios presumably intended to form the basis of others.¹ There were also enough references to science to suggest that the notebook’s title, with its identification of poetry as a process of experimentation on physical matter, was not a dead metaphor. One of Hardy’s notes describes a “Poetry of the Microscope—in which minute things are regarded as vast”; another proposes a “charming set of Poems” based on a “microscopic view of Nature.” Hardy speculates that the microscopic precision of scientific observation might demonstrate the materiality of spirit (“A View. Souls, being the essence of beings, are as small as pins’ heads, & are in shoals around us”) but he also expresses “a dread—not of the old spectres, but of those science reveals.”² The title and contents of the “Poetical Matter” notebook indicate that Hardy, at the end of his career, considered the instruments and methods of science, and the questions they raised about the relation between the material and the immaterial, to be of central importance to his poetry.

This book borrows part of its title from Hardy, and it argues that his poems represent the culmination of a nineteenth-century tradition that identified poetry as (among other things) an experimental investigation of the materiality of nature. It aims to show that the language and methods of the physical sciences (primarily physics, but also the related fields of chemistry, geology, and astronomy) made a significant contribution to Romantic and Victorian understandings of poetry. And, as a book that unequivocally endorses the “two-way” model of literature and science studies first elaborated by Gillian Beer, it also argues that the influence was reciprocal.³ Nineteenth-century science writers frequently wrote verse and quoted the verse of others, using the cultural authority of poetry to validate their observations, to summarise and communicate their theories, and to legitimise their developing and sometimes controversial disciplines.

As I intend to demonstrate, the reciprocal exchange of language and ideas between poetry and the physical sciences was made possible by a widespread belief in the similarity of their methods. Both poetry and science were understood to be inductive: founded on the observation, description, and interpretation of material things and empirical phenomena, they also claimed the right to use their considerations of matter as the basis of theoretical and non-empirical conclusions. Inductive poetics in nineteenth-century Britain was based primarily on the theory and practice of Romantic lyric; the structured eloquence of lyric verse was widely viewed as the most culturally respectable expression of inductive thought’s movement from the material to the theoretical. This was one of the reasons why scientists persistently wrote and quoted lyric poetry. But the inductive model also informed definitions of epic, and writers of epic poems frequently deployed their reconstructions of the past (whether personal, political, or cosmological) as the foundations both of transhistorical explanations of nature and of speculative predictions about the future of the universe.

Induction was not without its detractors; doubts were voiced throughout the century about whether the transition from the concrete to the abstract was methodologically and epistemologically valid. The rhetoric of experimentation, a concept that was not exclusively linked to the natural sciences but that derived more and more of its credibility from their growing prominence in British culture, was frequently deployed by science writers and by poets in an effort to resolve those doubts.⁴ The repetition and comparison of observations, they claimed, justified the construction of theoretical conclusions on the basis of material evidence. This book argues that nineteenth-century poetry was experimental in the broad sense implied by John Herschel’s definition of experiment, in his 1830 Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy, as an “active observation” of nature, in which:

we cross-examine our witness, and by comparing one part of his evidence with the other, while he is yet before us, and reasoning upon it in his presence, are enabled to put pointed and searching questions, the answer to which may at once enable us to make up our minds.⁵

Few poets seconded Herschel’s confidence in the capacity of experimentation “to make up our minds”; in fact, both poets and science writers more often than not emphasised the baffling intractability of nature’s materiality. But the two sets of writers shared the conviction that their studies of matter were of necessity active, involving to some extent the manipulation—whether physical, imaginative, or linguistic—as well as the observation of material things. Nineteenth-century poetry and science were linked by a preoccupation with the relations between matter and mind. Different writers put forward competing and often antagonistic answers to a question that was central to the physical sciences and to poetry: was the inductive interpretation of nature a creative act of the interpreting mind or an objective and realist reconstruction of external processes?

This question also informed debates about poetic form, specifically the ongoing disagreements between poets, critics, and theorists about whether poetic rhythm was a material phenomenon or an abstract pattern imposed on language by the mind. The disputants often invoked theories and evidence from the physical sciences in support of their claims, and science writers incorporated discussions of verse into their accounts of the universe. The main reason for this surprising overlap between poetry and science was that, whichever side they took, writers on poetry rarely limited the scope of their theories to verse itself. Instead they proposed, with varying degrees of assurance, that poetic rhythms, whether ideal or material, were expressive and representative of the essential structure of reality. The rhythms of verse, these writers argued, were exemplary instances either of the activity of human and divine minds, or of the rhythmic and material processes that constituted nature.⁶ This was an ambitious claim for poetic form, and one of the aims of this book is to examine the intellectual, cultural, and political contexts that helped to validate and sustain it, in various iterations put forward by poets and by science writers, throughout the long nineteenth century.

Scholarship on literature and science has typically identified nineteenth-century physics as a science of immateriality rather than of matter. Perhaps the most influential example of this argument is Alice Jenkins’s Space and the “March of Mind”: Literature and the Physical Sciences in Britain 1815–1850, which highlights “the tendency towards dematerialization,” towards the rational study of abstract concepts rather than the sensuous experience of material things, “in early nineteenth-century physics and other disciplines.”⁷ My emphasis is different. While recognising the importance of dematerialising accounts of science (and of poetry), I argue that matter remained the primary object of study, and a key source of contention, in poetry and in the physical sciences. Poets and science writers alike were preoccupied with the epistemological question of whether or not it was possible for the mind to apprehend matter through the senses, and with the ontological question of whether or not matter was the exclusive cause of natural processes. Their answers to these questions were influenced by, and helped to fuel, some of the most prominent philosophical, religious, and political debates in nineteenth-century Britain: theories of materiality were closely tied, for example, to disputes about the supposed atheism of science, and to the opposition between reformist and revolutionary models of political progress.

The physical sciences’ sustained focus on matter, and the way in which that focus in turn made room for abstract and dematerialising perspectives, is evident in several of their most important theories. At the start of the nineteenth century, John Dalton’s atomic weight theory, set out in the first part of his New System of Chemical Philosophy (1808), proposed that the chemical elements of matter consisted of solid, indivisible, and indestructible atoms of different weights.⁸ This quantitative model of matter, founded on the precise measurement of substances obtained through experimentation, was an influential example of the epistemological and theoretical efficacy of the experimental method. But it also raised two issues that were to be of concern to science writers and to poets throughout the rest of the century: it invited comparisons (damaging or not, depending on a writer’s philosophical and political stance) between modern science and the materialist (and arguably atheist) atomism of classical Epicurean philosophy; and it destabilised understandings of materiality by presenting as the ultimate constituent of matt...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Wordsworth, Humphry Davy, and the Forms of Nature
• 3. Quotation and the Rhetoric of Experiment
• 4. Words and Things in the Periodical Press
• 5. Tennyson’s Sounds
• 6. Mathilde Blind: Rhythm, Energy, and Revolution
• 7. Hardy’s Measures
• Back Matter