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Wordsworth, Humphry Davy, and the Forms of Nature

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Nineteenth-Century Poetry and the Physical Sciences

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine ((PLSM))

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Abstract

This chapter argues that, at the start of the nineteenth century, William Wordsworth and the chemist Humphry Davy agreed that poetry and chemistry shared a focus on the material things which they termed “the forms of nature.” They also agreed, however, in differentiating between the aims of poetry and those of science: while the experimental investigations of chemistry analysed the physical forces and processes that shaped nature’s forms, the linguistic forms of poetry revealed and communicated the metaphysical powers that were hidden within seemingly inert matter. The chapter traces these two different readings of the forms of nature in Davy’s science writing and his poetry, in Wordsworth’s The Excursion and his Preface to Lyrical Ballads, and in the writings of their mutual friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    William Wordsworth, The Ruined Cottage and The Pedlar, ed. James Butler (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), 121 and 123.

  2. 2.

    Wordsworth, Last Poems, 1821–1850, ed. Jared Curtis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 448.

  3. 3.

    Maurice Hindle, “Humphry Davy and William Wordsworth: A Mutual Influence,” Romanticism 18 (2012): 20; Duncan Wu, Wordsworth’s Reading 1800–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 71–72.

  4. 4.

    See Jonathan Smith, Fact and Feeling: Baconian Science and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), 45–91; and Sharon Ruston, Creating Romanticism: Case Studies in the Literature, Science and Medicine of the 1790s (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 7–27.

  5. 5.

    Catherine E. Ross, “‘Twin Labourers and Heirs of the Same Hopes’: The Professional Rivalry of Humphry Davy and William Wordsworth,” in Romantic Science: The Literary Forms of Natural History, ed. Noah Heringman (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), 24.

  6. 6.

    Wordsworth, The Excursion, ed. Sally Bushell, James Butler, and Michael C. Jaye (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 1:969–70. Subsequent line references are from this edition and will be cited in the text.

  7. 7.

    Plato, The Republic, in The Works of Plato, trans. Thomas Taylor, vol. 1 (London: R. Wilks, 1804), 354.

  8. 8.

    See Henry S. Turner, “Lessons from Literature for the Historian of Science (and Vice Versa): Reflections on ‘Form’,” Isis 101 (2010): 583.

  9. 9.

    Jonathan Kramnick and Anahid Nersessian, “Form and Explanation,” Critical Inquiry 43 (2017): 661.

  10. 10.

    Humphry Davy, Elements of Chemical Philosophy, in The Collected Works of Sir Humphry Davy, ed. John Davy, 9 vols. (London: Smith, Elder, 1839–40), 4:46.

  11. 11.

    David Knight, Humphry Davy: Science and Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 58.

  12. 12.

    Davy, Elements, 4:44.

  13. 13.

    Davy, “An Essay on Heat, Light, and the Combinations of Light,” in Collected Works, 2:84.

  14. 14.

    Jon Klancher discusses the founding of the RI, and Davy’s early career there, in Transfiguring the Arts and Sciences: Knowledge and Cultural Institutions in the Romantic Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 51–84.

  15. 15.

    Christopher Lawrence, “The Power and the Glory: Humphry Davy and Romanticism,” in Romanticism and the Sciences, ed. Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 222. For a contrasting interpretation, which emphasises Davy’s materialism, see Lisa Ann Robertson, “‘Swallowed up in Impression’: Humphry Davy’s Materialist Theory of Embodied Transcendence and William Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’,” European Romantic Review 26 (2015): 591–614.

  16. 16.

    Paul H. Fry, Wordsworth and the Poetry of What We Are (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 10.

  17. 17.

    Tom Furniss, “A Romantic Geology: James Hutton’s 1788 ‘Theory of the Earth’,” Romanticism 16 (2010): 309.

  18. 18.

    Davy, Elements, 4:1.

  19. 19.

    Davy, RI MS HD/13H, 29. Quoted by courtesy of the Royal Institution of Great Britain.

  20. 20.

    Davy, “Introductory Lecture to the Chemistry of Nature,” in Collected Works, 8:168.

  21. 21.

    Ibid., 8:169.

  22. 22.

    Davy, Researches, Chemical and Philosophical, Chiefly Concerning Nitrous Oxide, in Collected Works, 3:2.

  23. 23.

    Davy, Elements, 4:45–46.

  24. 24.

    Davy to Thomas Andrew Knight, 12 March 1809, http://www.davy-letters.org.uk (accessed 8 March 2019). This website will be superseded by The Collected Letters of Sir Humphry Davy, ed. Tim Fulford and Sharon Ruston, 4 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

  25. 25.

    Davy, RI MS HD/9, 167. Quoted by courtesy of the Royal Institution of Great Britain.

  26. 26.

    Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802), in Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems, 1797–1800, ed. James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 743–44.

  27. 27.

    Wordsworth, “A Poet’s Epitaph,” in Lyrical Ballads, ll. 17–18, 25–32.

  28. 28.

    Simon Jarvis, Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 29.

  29. 29.

    Wordsworth, Preface, 752.

  30. 30.

    Ibid., 753.

  31. 31.

    Brian Goldberg, The Lake Poets and Professional Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 221.

  32. 32.

    Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Robert Southey, 21 October 1801, in Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956–71), 2:768.

  33. 33.

    Coleridge, Marginalia, vol. 1, ed. George Whalley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 572.

  34. 34.

    Coleridge, Notebooks, vol. 5, ed. Kathleen Coburn and Anthony John Harding (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), entry 5479.

  35. 35.

    Davy, Consolations in Travel; or, The Last Days of a Philosopher, in Collected Works, 9:363.

  36. 36.

    Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, ed. John Beer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 395.

  37. 37.

    Coleridge, The Friend (1818), ed. Barbara E. Rooke, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 1:467.

  38. 38.

    Angela Leighton, On Form: Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Legacy of a Word (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 7.

  39. 39.

    Coleridge, Friend, 1:464.

  40. 40.

    Seamus Perry, Coleridge and the Uses of Division (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 12.

  41. 41.

    Trevor H. Levere, “‘The Lovely Shapes and Sounds Intelligible’: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Humphry Davy, Science and Poetry,” in Nature Transfigured: Science and Literature, 1700–1900, ed. John Christie and Sally Shuttleworth (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), 88.

  42. 42.

    Coleridge, Friend, 1:471, quoting John Milton, Paradise Lost, 10:246–48.

  43. 43.

    Davy, RI MS HD/22A, 29. Quoted by courtesy of the Royal Institution of Great Britain.

  44. 44.

    Wordsworth, Preface, 750, 747, and 748.

  45. 45.

    Jan Golinski, Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 2.

  46. 46.

    Davy, “Introductory Lecture,” 8:167–68.

  47. 47.

    Robert Mitchell, Experimental Life: Vitalism in Romantic Science and Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 18.

  48. 48.

    Davy, A Syllabus of a Course of Lectures on Chemistry, Delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain (London: Royal Institution, 1802), 3.

  49. 49.

    Andrea K. Henderson, Algebraic Art: Mathematical Formalism and Victorian Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 129–30.

  50. 50.

    Davy, “Lines Descriptive of Feelings,” in The Annual Anthology, ed. Robert Southey (London: Longman and Rees, 1800), 294.

  51. 51.

    Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone, 2007), 197.

  52. 52.

    The poem is also informed by what Tim Fulford describes as the “avowedly radical” records of experiments that Davy composed while working with Beddoes in Bristol, which deliberately “foregrounded, in their narrative voice and form as well as their content, the effects of individual subjectivity on experimental results.” Fulford, “Science and Poetry in 1790s Somerset: The Self-Experiment Narrative, the Aeriform Effusion, and the Greater Romantic Lyric,” ELH 85 (2018): 89.

  53. 53.

    Golinski, The Experimental Self: Humphry Davy and the Making of a Man of Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 158.

  54. 54.

    Davy, RI MS HD/13C, 94–95. Quoted by courtesy of the Royal Institution of Great Britain.

  55. 55.

    Sharon Ruston discusses the composition history of this poem in “From ‘The Life of the Spinosist’ to ‘Life’: Humphry Davy, Chemist and Poet,” in Literature and Chemistry: Elective Affinities, ed. Margareth Hagen and Margery Vibe Skagen (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2013), 77–97. For complete transcriptions of Davy’s poetic manuscripts, see Wahida Amin, “The Poetry and Science of Humphry Davy” (PhD thesis, University of Salford, 2013).

  56. 56.

    Davy, “The Spinosist,” RI MS HD/13C, 7. Quoted by courtesy of the Royal Institution of Great Britain.

  57. 57.

    Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, in The Collected Works of Spinoza, vol. 1, trans. Edwin Curley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 451.

  58. 58.

    Davy, Syllabus, 56–57.

  59. 59.

    Davy, Elements, 4:43.

  60. 60.

    Thomas Young, review of Davy, Elements of Chemical Philosophy, Quarterly Review 8 (1812): 85–86.

  61. 61.

    Davy, “Spinosist,” 8.

  62. 62.

    Ibid., 9–10.

  63. 63.

    Coleridge to Davy, 9 October 1800, in Collected Letters, 1:630.

  64. 64.

    Ruston, “Chemist and Poet,” 78.

  65. 65.

    Davy, “By Mr. Davy,” Gentleman’s Magazine 76 (1806): 1148. This version of the poem was located by Sam Illingworth. See Illingworth, A Sonnet to Science: Scientists and their Poetry (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019).

  66. 66.

    In a version of the poem that Davy printed privately in 1808, “law” is corrected to “laws.” See John Davy, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Humphry Davy, in Collected Works, 1:116.

  67. 67.

    Davy, “By Mr. Davy,” 1148.

  68. 68.

    Roger Sharrock, “The Chemist and the Poet: Sir Humphry Davy and the Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 17 (1962): 58.

  69. 69.

    Davy, “Life,” in A Collection of Poems, Chiefly Manuscript, and from Living Authors, ed. Joanna Baillie (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1823), 156–57.

  70. 70.

    Davy, “A Discourse Introductory to a Course of Lectures on Chemistry,” in Collected Works, 2:326.

  71. 71.

    Davy, Consolations in Travel, 9:361.

  72. 72.

    Ibid., 9:361–62.

  73. 73.

    Kurtis Hessel, “Humphry Davy’s Intergalactic Travel: Catching Sight of Another Genre,” Studies in Romanticism 54 (2015): 58–59. Hessel sets out a similar argument about Davy’s RI lectures in “The Romantic-Era Lecture: Dividing and Reuniting the Arts and Sciences,” Configurations 24 (2016): 501–32.

  74. 74.

    Davy to Jane Davy, 14 July 1828, http://www.davy-letters.org.uk.

  75. 75.

    Wordsworth, The Thirteen-Book Prelude (1805), ed. Mark L. Reed (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 3:122–29.

  76. 76.

    Adam Potkay, Wordsworth’s Ethics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 80–81.

  77. 77.

    Tristram Wolff, “Romantic Stone Speech and the Appeal of the Inorganic,” ELH 84 (2017): 626.

  78. 78.

    Wordsworth, Thirteen-Book Prelude, 3:156 and 158–59.

  79. 79.

    Dorothy Wordsworth to Margaret Beaumont, 27 October 1805, in The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. Alan G. Hill, Mary Moorman, and Chester L. Shaver, 8 vols., 2nd edn. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967–93), 1:634.

  80. 80.

    Onno Oerlemans, Romanticism and the Materiality of Nature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 21.

  81. 81.

    Ibid., 61.

  82. 82.

    Wordsworth, The Fourteen-Book Prelude, ed. W. J. B. Owen (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 3:134.

  83. 83.

    Wordsworth, Preface (1815), in Shorter Poems, 1807–1820, ed. Carl H. Ketcham (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 638.

  84. 84.

    Ibid., 639–40.

  85. 85.

    Ibid., 633.

  86. 86.

    Coleridge to Wordsworth, 30 May 1815, in Collected Letters, 4:575.

  87. 87.

    Wordsworth, Preface, 755.

  88. 88.

    Susan J. Wolfson, Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 22.

  89. 89.

    Wordsworth, Preface, 756.

  90. 90.

    See Wordsworth, Excursion, 38.

  91. 91.

    Sally Bushell, Re-Reading The Excursion: Narrative, Response and the Wordsworthian Dramatic Voice (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 14.

  92. 92.

    John Wyatt, Wordsworth and the Geologists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 71–104. See also Daniel Brown, “William Rowan Hamilton and William Wordsworth: The Poetry of Science,” Studies in Romanticism 51 (2012): 475–501.

  93. 93.

    Fulford, “The Volcanic Humphry Davy,” in The Regency Revisited, ed. Fulford and Michael E. Sinatra (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 142.

  94. 94.

    Davy, “Discourse,” 2:319.

  95. 95.

    Wordsworth to John Thelwall, January 1804, in Letters, 1:434.

  96. 96.

    See Wordsworth, Excursion, 46.

  97. 97.

    Peter McDonald, Sound Intentions: The Workings of Rhyme in Nineteenth-Century Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 66.

  98. 98.

    Wordsworth to Coleridge, 22 May 1815, in Letters, 3:238.

  99. 99.

    Fry, What We Are, 6.

  100. 100.

    Jonathan Farina, “The Excursion and ‘the Surfaces of Things’,” Wordsworth Circle 45 (2014): 99 and 102.

  101. 101.

    Wordsworth to Catherine Clarkson, January 1815, in Letters, 3:188.

  102. 102.

    William Hazlitt, review of The Excursion, in William Wordsworth: The Critical Heritage (1793–1820), ed. Robert Woof (Abingdon: Routledge, 2001), 369–70.

  103. 103.

    Wordsworth, Preface, 753.

  104. 104.

    Wordsworth, “Composed when a Probability Existed of our Being Obliged to Quit Rydal Mount as a Residence” (fair copy), in The Tuft of Primroses, with Other Late Poems for The Recluse, ed. Joseph F. Kishel (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), ll. 106–17.

  105. 105.

    Ibid., ll. 48–61.

  106. 106.

    Coleridge to Davy, 3 February 1801, in Collected Letters, 2:670.

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    Gregory Tate

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Tate, G. (2020). Wordsworth, Humphry Davy, and the Forms of Nature. In: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and the Physical Sciences. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31441-5_2

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