[New-Poetry] Blinded by science

[jforjames at aol.com]

http://www.literaryreview.co.uk/fara_10_08.html

Patricia Fara
WATCHERS OF THE SKIES
The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science
By Richard Holmes (HarperPress 554pp £25)


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Whatever C P Snow may have decreed about an unbridgeable divide between the Two Cultures, Romantic writers were fully aware of recent scientific discoveries. As a twenty-year-old medical student, John Keats spent a drink-fuelled night enthusing over a newly purchased verse translation of Homer's Iliad. 

Early the next morning, he took less than four hours to set down his own famous poem, in which he compared his feelings with those of 'some watcher of the skies/When a new planet swims into his ken'. Keats was referring to William Herschel, the astronomer who had effectively enlarged the solar system at the end of the eighteenth century by detecting a sixth planet, now known as Uranus, 

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