Chapter 3: Patterns of Creativity

In A Poet’s Epitaph, Wordsworth observes science with a mind which is critical. He glorifies nature and admires the beauty that it imparts to humanity. It is noticeable how people ruin it with their art and science. In Lamia, Keats explains the two facets of the nature of humans: one is emotional, and the other one is sensual. Keats calls pleasure unreal and philosophy destructive. One should not consider Wordsworth and Keat’s opinions as absolute. Shelley, for example, has a different opinion on this. It is good for scientists to consider Shelley as his attitude to Science is opposite to that of Wordsworth. He was not tired of expressing his thoughts regarding science in his poetry. To him, Science symbolised peace, joy and illumination.

A British physicist Desmond King-Hele, is the author of ‘Shelley’s Thought and Work’. He said that Shelley’s attitude to Science highlights the climate of modern thoughts in which he wished to live. Shelley explains the mechanisms of nature with a wealth of detail and precision. It is an excellent fusion of science and poetry. A scientist reviewing the work of a poet on science, S. Chandrasekhar, gives two examples from the poetry of Shelley to support what is said about him. He explains that in his poem Cloud, a scientific monograph, a creative myth and a picaresque tale of cloud adventure are combined together. He then cites an instance from Prometheus Unbound, described by Herbert Read as the expression given to the desire of humanity for spiritual liberty and intellectual light.

Darwin, a great scientist famous for his work On the Origin of Species, has said that he enjoyed literature until he was 30. He liked the poetic works of Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, etc., immensely. The historical plays of Shakespeare provided such pleasure to him. As he grew older and reached 30, he began losing interest in music and pictures, which once gave great delight to him. He tried reading the poetry of Shakespeare which nauseated him and made him intolerably dull. It is surprising to see that the answer to this change is in the statement by Darwin. To process the laws out of facts, his mind had become like a grinding machine. The part of the brain on which greater tastes depended had gone to waste. Darwin found it hard to infer it, and hence his romance with literature passed away.

The poets are the bards who celebrate nature which surrounds them, while the scientists harvest nature and its mechanisms and mark the inventions. Poets like Keats and Wordsworth criticise the exploitation of nature by humans, whereas scientists utilize the available resources of nature to invent and create. However, it is not that enmity is present between the scientists and the poets. Here, Darwin enjoyed literature until he was thirty. He later said, ‘My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone on which the higher tastes depend.’ Hence, it is clear that the poets celebrate the present while the scientists invent and create, leading us to a tomorrow which makes a difference.

In this essay, the author figures out the reasons for the variations in the patterns of creativity between the practitioners of science and art. He created an assortment of remarks which contained the answer. He gives examples depicting how the scientists and poets noticed each other explains the contrast in their opinions. Poets like Keats and Wordsworth are nature’s worshippers and believe that nature is sabotaged by humans due to technological advancement. There are a few poets, such as Shelley, who create poetry on Science. It is very difficult to separate the views of the practitioners and hold them into compartments which are watertight. For example, Darwin enjoyed literature immensely as it provided him joy until the age of 30. By appreciating Shelley’s A Defence of poetry, W. B. Yeats named it “the profoundest essay on the foundation of poetry in the English language.” In the end, the author wonders about “why there is no similar A Defence of Science written by a scientist of equal endowment.” Probably, he was aware of the answer to the question.