When Poets Were Scientists and Nature Their Mysterious Muse - "The Age of Wonder"

[groovedaddy]

William Herschel, the German-born, star-gazing musician who effectively doubled the size of the solar system with a single discovery in 1781, was not regarded as a scientist. That word had not been coined during most of the era that will now be known, thanks to Richard Holmes’s amazingly ambitious, buoyant new fusion of history, art, science, philosophy and biography, as “The Age of Wonder.” And Mr. Holmes’s excitement at fusing long-familiar events and personages into something startlingly new is not unlike the exuberance of the age that animates his groundbreaking book.

In Herschel’s day (and that of his sister, Caroline, who functioned as his doting assistant to the point of feeding him like a baby bird), science was deductively methodical. And astronomy was no amateur’s game. But Herschel charted the skies as if making musical notations. And when he lacked instruments with enough precision, he painstakingly invented a telescope with startling new powers of magnification.

Looking through it, he noted a starlike object, twice as far from the Sun as Saturn, that appeared to be moving yet did not have a comet’s tail. He identified this as the planet Georgium Sidus, first named for George III of Britain but later known as Uranus. (Mr. Holmes is much too spirited a writer to resist making a bon mot about the English pronunciation of that name.)

Beyond enlivening the story of Herschel’s discovery into a gripping narrative, this book speculates fascinatingly about the ramifications of such a breakthrough. Thanks to Herschel the idea of a fixed universe was challenged, replaced by a cosmos in flux. Was that cause for wonder or terror? What were its theological implications? How would it influence a future generation of poets? (The thrill of this breakthrough would later figure in one of Keats’s most famous sonnets, “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer.”) Where would it figure in the relay race of scientific discoveries?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/09/books/09maslin.html?th&emc=th

[roughsatori]

1. Thanks for posting. I was not aware of Herschel's influence on Keats's

"On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer." I'll have to pull out my Keats later today to see for myself.

I would like to read the section on Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein." I love her book and concider it the finest gay love story written.

As a complete Francophile I laughed out loud about the French Air Balloon's painted Easter egg colors.

This article reminded me of something I read when I was about 15: That it used to be important for poets to know the names of flowers, including the Latin. I took to studying the names of flowers.

Enough of my free associating: Thanks for posting this book review.