In the 1802 “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads, William Wordsworth states that “Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science.” In other words, he presents poetry as an informing principle: a “breath” or “spirit” that gives contingent physical attributes, the discrete facts of science, an identifiable face. Although many Continental scientists of the time - notably the German Naturphilosophen - shared this Romantic metaphysic, the strong tradition of British empiricism was far less receptive to it. The economic and technological successes of the Industrial Revolution vindicated the type of empiricist research based upon sensory experience and practical experiment that Francis Bacon had theorized in the early seventeenth century. Doctrines of positivism, which maintain that the information which science extracts from sense-perception is the only nonanalytic knowledge possible, exercised a powerful influence over British intellectual life from the middle of the nineteenth century onward. They led science to break its traditional ties to philosophy and religion and to emerge as the paradigmatic form of knowledge. Poetry enters the Victorian era endowed by Romanticism with a metaphysical and cultural authority that it struggles to preserve in the face of such scientism. The present chapter explores the ways in which a range of poems reify, reinflect, or reject both this familiar narrative of combat and contrasting fortunes, and its ideological underpinning: namely, the hierarchical distinction between poetry and science that Wordsworth asserts in his “Preface.”