Today’s Poem: Science and Poetry

William Blake and the Doctrine of Double Truth

William Blake’s Ancient of Days (Wikimedia Commons)

“The Atoms of Democritus / And Newton’s Particles of light / Are sands upon the Red sea shore / Where Israel’s tents do shine so bright,” William Blake (1757–1827) declared in “Mock on, Mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau,” a poem routinely taken as his rejection of science and Enlightenment reason.

It it, though? The relation of science and poetry is a curious one. Often enough, poets seem to say that the scientific view must be excluded — rejected or ignored — for poetry to live. In “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer,” for example Walt Whitman (1819–1892), listening to an astronomy lecture, finds himself becoming “tired and sick.” And fleeing outside, he recovers in “the mystical moist night-air” by looking up “in perfect silence at the stars.” The stars in their truth are perceived by the poet, not the scientist.

Or Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849), who in his “Sonnet — To Science” takes what would become a standard humanist view of the richnes…