Fact, verses, science: Objective poetry and scientific speculation in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Charles Darwin

This dissertation takes as its premise that studies of the relationship between poetry and science treat poetry as obfuscation or as a general term for "metaphor" and "imagination." By analyzing the poetry and scientific prose of Goethe, the poetry and notebooks of Coleridge and the notebooks and books of Charles Darwin, I show that poetry, in the form of verse strategies like rhyme and meter, was a viable and successful rhetorical tool for the discussion of scientific concepts. These concepts tended to be speculative; concepts without physical evidence. Rather than just center on the imaginative aspect of speculation, I show that a poetics of speculative science exists in the writings of these authors, as well as in such scientists as Erasmus Darwin and Charles Lyell. This poetics exists within a specific historical framework, the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, during which time new sciences like geology and biology were being codified and literature was beginning to be understood as the expression of inner emotional states. In the midst of these transitions, Goethe, Coleridge and Charles Darwin took advantage of rhetoric's new status as also signifying valuation and emotion to create what I call a "felt thinking." In Goethe, this form of thought lends the observer access to inner formative principles of natural objects (with ideas from and contra Kant), and he tends to express these thoughts in a language tends toward physical qualities, such as rhymes, puns and verse forms. Coleridge also uses formal means to disclose facts about his own body. Coleridge's body becomes a site of scientific experiment, reminiscent of the public experiments of chemists such as Humphry Davy who tried to create a "feeling of science" in his audience. By closely examining the prose in Coleridge's notebooks, this "felt science" is expressed using symbols that incorporate temporal experiences and meter, as read through Coleridge's notion of "double-touch," that takes on a physiological dimension. In the last chapter on Charles Darwin, I show Darwin working as both a Romantic poet and Victorian prose writer in his science, working with "ontological metaphors" (metaphors that are not eliminable in the face of facticity), Romantic notions of the lyric and with a Victorian style rhythmic prose. These rhetorical techniques make possible Darwin's vivid and believable descriptions of unseen natural forces, both geological and biological. These analyses seek to show poetry working as something more than mere aesthetic flourish in a scientific context in which notions of the objective and subjective, and the attendant language of both these epistemological states were shifting.