Wordsworth & Darwin

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

- Christine Avery

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'. According to reductionism, biology in the end boils down to chemistry, and chemistry to physics, and the implication drawn might be that poetry boils down to biology. But the battle is far from over.

In her excellent 2009 book Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and 19th Century Fiction, Gillian Beer contrasts the disciples of reason with more imaginative creators. Beer lays out Sigmund Freud's claim that “the universal narcissism of men, their self-love, has up to the present suffered three severe blows from the researches of science” (originally from ‘A Difficulty in the Path of Psycho-Analysis’, 1953). These blows are, in chronological order: the Copernican revolution displacing the Earth from the centre of the universe; the Darwinian argument that ‘man is not a being different from animals or superior to them’; and, thirdly, Freud's own demonstration that ‘the ego is not master in its own house’ since we often act with unconscious motivation. These ‘blows’ to humanity's sense of specialness, are connected as successive steps forward of the rational mind.