Introduction: Science and Victorian Poetry

THE "PHILOSOPHICAL . . . CONTRADISTINCTION" BETWEEN "POETRY AND MATTER of Fact, or Science" made by William Wordsworth in his famous 1802 "Preface" to the Lyrical Ballads has been enormously influential in discussions of the relations between science and Victorian poetry. ¹ The understanding of this particular cultural interface was, for a very long time, dominated—and distorted—by a rigid and ahistorical contrast between abstract poetic idealism and empirical scientific positivism which, in its insistence on a sharp divide between the subjective and the objective, pitted the metaphysical and imaginative values of poetry against the dispiriting, but increasingly authoritative, creeds of science and industry. Poetry, claimed John Stuart Mill echoing Wordsworth, "act[s] upon the emotions; and therein is . . . distinguished from . . . its logical opposite, namely . . . science." ² Such a hierarchical distinction, of course, takes no account of the enormous diversity of scientific and poetic discourses produced during the Victorian age, or of the different ways in which they negotiated the meaning of the natural world and the value of human life, but it has proved remarkably, and frustratingly, enduring.

Even when, in the 1970s and 1980s, it came increasingly to be recognized that science formed a fundamental and integral part of Victorian culture and that its growing importance was registered in a variety of literary forms, scholarly attention tended to focus almost exclusively on the interplay of science and the novel. The "heavy silence surrounding" Victorian poetry, as Isobel Armstrong observes, is "a striking cultural phenomenon," but nowhere has this critical reticence been more conspicuous than in scholarship on the relations between science and literary culture. ³ While George Levine argued that the realist novel's aesthetic ideals of detachment and self-abnegation were the "cultural twin to the project of Victorian science," the more expressive and personal ideals of poetry continued to be regarded by many critics as the cultural opposite of science. ⁴ Lionel Stevenson's pioneering Darwin Among the Poets had set a marker for the study of science and Victorian poetry as far back as 1932, but it is only in the last decade or so that sustained attention has begun to be paid to the subject by distinguished scholars such as Gillian Beer, Isobel Armstrong, Patricia O'Neill, Helen Groth, and Daniel Brown, whose splendid Hopkins' Idealism: Philosophy, Physics, Poetry (1997) was one of the first monographs on the subject to appear for many years. As the work of these scholars has shown convincingly, Victorian poetry and science frequently employed the same metaphors, themes, images, and ideological orientations, and, far from being antithetical, the two forms were intimately related in the development of new philosophies of nature such as the German Naturphilosophie. ⁵

This special number of Victorian Poetry is intended as an addition to this new direction in what Stefan Collini terms the "sub-field or 'interdiscipline'" of "science and literature" scholarship, and it is the hope of the editors that it will deepen our understanding of the range and variety of the creative interpenetrations of poetry and science across the Victorian period. ⁶ It is not, though, in any sense an overview—exhaustive or otherwise—of the interrelations of science and Victorian poetry. Rather, the principal aim is to re-examine the relations between science and poetry in the light of recent developments in literary studies and the history of science, which have both emphasized that science, no less than poetry, is a mode of discourse that, rather than being objective and value-free, is always to some extent conditioned by the social, linguistic, and cultural contexts in which it is produced—a "cultural formation equivalent to any other," according to Michel Serres. ⁷ In this view, science emerges as another form of cultural practice, constructed in specific local contexts out of the available cultural and material resources. Indeed, science, as several scholars have pointed out, is intrinsically and inextricably textual, and relies on the same rhetorical structures and tropes found in all other forms of...