The Poetic Imagination: Of Myopia, Botany, and Electromagnetism

Abstract

It was gentleman's tradition in the family of the French physicist Andre-Marie Ampere to write poetry. Ampere's father JeanJacques, who was silk merchant and governmental official in Lyon, spent his free hours composing tragedies. At very early age Andre-Marie was memorizing entire scenes from Racine and Voltaire which he would recite during solitary walks along the Saone. While the father's tastes ran toward Corneillean conflicts-Jean Jacques's play Artaxerxe ou le roi constitutionnel treats of the clash between love and duty within political context-the son preferred to write simple lyric poetry. Between his eighteenth and twentieth years Andre-Marie did little but wander in the countryside and record his impressions of nature in verse. To those who knew Ampere for man of almost painful sensibility and undisciplined passion, his poetry is singularly disappointing: nowhere is there fresh image or an impulsive rhythm. The literary critic Sainte-Beuve, who became acquainted with Andre-Marie through his son, attributed the former's colorless lyrics to his myopia. Ampere could not see with any precision the nature he thought he was describing. It was only later, declared Sainte-Beuve, when certain M. Ballanche placed pair of spectacles upon Ampere's nose that a cry of admiration escaped him as though second sight had been suddenly revealed: he contemplated for the first time nature in its distinct colors and its horizons, as it is given to the human eye.'