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Articles

Wordsworth & Darwin

Christine Avery wonders whether poetry can help us to deal with science.

In his poetic autobiography The Prelude (1799), William Wordsworth describes a dream in which he saw an Arab horseman riding by at desperate speed carrying a stone and a shell. The stone represented reason and science, while the shell stood for poetry and prophecy. Both were seen to be in urgent danger, and it’s clear that Wordsworth attributed equal and supreme value to both of them.

Whether the danger to these values has increased or diminished since Wordsworth’s time (1770-1850) would be hard to estimate, but it seems clear that reason and science have steadily gained prestige at the expense of poetry and imagination. This has only been strengthened by the forces of positivism and reductionism, with their battering formula of ‘this is only that’.

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