Mont Blanc Imagined: Poetry, Science and the Prospect-View in Davy and Coleridge

Abstract

My discussion of Davy intervenes in several critical debates about Romantic literature and science. First, I show that for Davy, ‘literature’ and science were neither inimical nor even merely analogous disciplines. Poetry was not simply related to scientific discourse because both expressed the enquirer’s understanding of nature; it was formally related to experimental enquiry as a formulation on paper of the mental organization of the world-as-apprehended that is both akin to and a preparation for the mental organization of the world-as-apprehended that takes form as experimental design. Second, Davy’s poetry, developing Coleridge’s, constitutes a development of the prospect-view tradition in that it is as concerned with the mental process of prospecting as it is with the object viewed. In this respect, it is a modification of the materialist account of perception of the medical and scientific men who set the agenda of the Bristol circle in which both Coleridge and Davy first flourished – Erasmus Darwin and Darwin’s main advocate, their mentor Thomas Beddoes.