‘When Universal Nature I Survey’

Abstract

A philosophical poem treats the human condition, including our place in the world, the nature of our mind and what it knows and how we develop wisdom. From the mid-seventeenth century onwards, the spread of new scientific knowledge across Europe was profoundly altering the way poets thought and wrote about these questions. This chapter examines the poetry of natural philosophy in Britain in the first half of the eighteenth century. In this Newtonian period, a new confidence in the rational interpretation of the cosmos according to universal laws brought about equally confident verses aiming to depict God’s creation in all its harmonious beauty. Following the publication in 1709 of Death’s Vision, the ‘first consciously scientific long poem’ of the century, came a cluster of productions from, among others, Richard Blackmore, Henry Baker, Moses Browne and Henry Brooke.1 With the possible exception of Blackmore’s Creation, few of these poems have received much sustained critical attention. Philosophical poetry in its more didactic guise seems to lack the imaginative dimensions or emotional appeal of, say, the blank verse meditations of Mark Akenside, Edward Young or William Wordsworth. Yet these less canonical poets were also grappling with how to (re)conceive the world as the object of both empirical and aesthetic enquiry.