The Romantic period (roughly 1770-1830) was better represented by poetry than by science. On the poetic side, you had Keats, Shelley, Byron, Coleridge, Blake, Wordsworth, Goethe, Schiller, Pushkin, and more. On the science side, you had Michael Faraday, William Herschel, Humphry Davy, Erasmus Darwin; no slouches, to be sure, but you wouldn’t pick out this period as one of the golden ages of science.
But the interesting thing about this era, according to Richard Holmes’s new book The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science, is that the scientists and the poets were deeply interested in each others’ work. That’s what I gather, anyway — not having read the book yet myself — from Freeman Dyson’s review in the New York Review of Books. It’s a provocative look into the cultural mindset of another time, when the power of science to discover new things about the world wasn’t yet quite taken for granted. Dyson quotes a stanza from Byron’s Don Juan:
This is the patent age of new inventions
For killing bodies, and for saving souls,
All propagated with the best intentions;
Sir Humphry Davy’s lantern, by which coals
Are safely mined for in the mode he mentions,
Tombuctoo travels, voyages to the Poles,
Are ways to benefit mankind, as true,
Perhaps, as shooting them at Waterloo.
Scientists and poets don’t talk to each other as much any more (although there are exceptions). I tend to lament the fact that science doesn’t mingle more comfortably with other kinds of cultural currents of our time. Maybe it’s just not possible — we’ve become too specialized, leaving no room for a writer like Coleridge to proclaim “I shall attack Chemistry like a Shark.” But the more we scientists take seriously to share our ideas with the wider world, the more those ideas will take root.
Sean, the point about that era’s scientists and poets being interested in each other’s work is pretty common knowledge. Romanticism was, in no small part, about science (or the Enlightenment in general), and had alternative (to Enlightenment) conceptions of how to do and think about science that were pretty influential among scientists. Even dividing the Romantic poets and scientists is a bit artificial. Goethe himself (and just because Geothe was critical of Romanticism doesn’t mean that it wasn’t both consistent with early Romanticism and heavily influential on later Romanticism — if Monet said impressionism was a sickness, he’d still be an impressionist) was an accomplished science writer, with widely read writings on a variety of scientific topics. And Lamarck and Humboldt, to take two examples, were considered Romantic scientists.
Hey Sean, check out this book. Enjoy!
http://www.amazon.com/Atheist-Delusions-Christian-Revolution-Fashionable/dp/0300111908/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1249487708&sr=1-1
Science and Art talk to each other all the time : Take for example a pure mathematics, whose only purpose is to be beautiful.
A few quibbles: Goethe in his 1770’s Sturm und Drang period was really one of the first Romantic writers. He may have reacted to what he considered the later excesses of the style, but was involved in its origins. Beethoven the classicist disapproved of the early Romantic music he heard in his later years but nonetheless provided much of the inspiration for it.
Yes, I definitely consider Poe a Romantic writer. (Not Twain.) And Baudelaire. And Tennyson, who lived and wrote in the age of Wagner and Brahms.
The issue of Faraday will not go away. He lived and worked during the early Romantic period. He invented the electric power industry with his motors and transformers, and also the concept of fields which was highly significant for the work of Maxwell and Einstein. If Einstein considered Faraday one of the two or three most important physicists, who is the author of this book to tell us not much important science was being done at that time? What are his credentials next to Einstein’s? Puh-leeze!