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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
When Joseph Trapp, early in the eighteenth century, delivered his lectures on science as a subject for poetry, he was enthusiastic about the possibilities but pessimistic over the scientific poetry of his time. “The same age that shew'd a Boyle, a Halley, and a Newton,” he said, had not been able to produce a Virgil. Nothing is more suitable to the dignity of a poem, he continued, “than to celebrate the works of the great creator” or to the variety of poetical subject matter “than to describe the journeys of the heavenly orbs, the rise of thunder, and other meteors, the motion of the earth, and the tides of the sea; the attractive force of the magnet, the impulsive motion of light, and the slower progression of sound; and innumerable other wonders, in the unbounded storehouse of nature.”
1 Lectures on Poetry read in the Schools of Natural Philosophy at Oxford… translated from Latin (London, 1742). According to a footnote, p. 189, the work was written before Pope's Moral Essays, which fill the deficiency in poetry “as Sir Isaac Newton did of the natural.”
2 The most significant work has been done by Marjorie Nicolson in Newton Demands the Muse (Princeton, 1946) and in Science and Imagination (Cornell Univ. Press, 1956), a reprint of several shorter studies. Alan D. McKillop, The Background of Thomson's Seasons (Minneapolis, 1942), pp. 1–88, gives an excellent survey of many scientific poems and of scholarship to 1942, including several good articles by Herbert Drennon. Many other scientific poems are described in other contexts in the first 2 volumes of Hoxie N. Fairchild, Religious Trends in English Poetry (Columbia Univ. Press, 1939, 1942) and in Dwight L. Durling, The Géorgie Tradition in English Poetry (Columbia Univ. Press, 1935). The best overall discussion of the subject is by Bonamy Dobrée, The Broken Cistern: The Clark Lectures 1952–53 (London, 1954), pp. 52–103. The recent general discussions of Douglas Bush, Science and English Poetry (New York, 1950) and B. Ifor Evans, Literature and Science (London, 1954), have little of value for the 18th century.
3 Third ed. (London, 1722), p. 349.
4 The subtitle of Philosophia Pia is significant: A Discourse of the Religious Temper, and Tendencies of the Experimental Philosophy, which is profest by the Royal Society. The book is dedicated to Seth Ward, Bishop of Salisbury.
5 Enquiries into Human Nature, in VI Anatomic Praelections in the New Theater of the Royal College of Physicians in London, 1680. Charleton showed, in his MS notes to his copy, now in the British Museum, that he was aware that his arguments would appear as deistic to the orthodox. He adapted a passage from Sprat's History of the Royal Society, p. 349, as follows: “Praises, when they are offer'd up to Heaven from the mouth of one, who has well studied what he commends, are doubtless more suitable to the Divine Nature, than the blind applauses of the ignorant. This was the first service that Adam perform'd to his Creator, when he obey'd him in mustering, and naming, and looking into the nature of all creatures: and this had been the only Religion, if men had continued innocent in Paradise and had not wanted a Redemption.” This was interpreted, he added, as an attack on the Church and refuted by Henry Stubbe in pamphlets in 1671.
6 Charles E. Raven, John Ray, Naturalist: His Life and Works (Cambridge, 1942), pp. 452 ff., shows that the new editions of the Wisdom of God made “fresh and often original observations and inductions.” The first edition in 1691 contained 249 pages; 1692, 383 pages; 1701, 414 pages; and 1704, 464 pages. I have used the 12th corrected edition (London, 1759).
7 E. W. Strong, “Newton and God,” JHI, xiii (1952), 146–167, summarizes the previous scholarship on the subject.
8 The Boyle Lectures were collected in 1739 in 3 folio volumes by Sampson Lettsome and John Nicholl, A Defence of Natural and Revealed Religion.
9 The copy of John Clarke, containing his MS life of Wollaston and copious MS translations of Hebrew, Greek, and Latin quotations in the footnotes to the lectures, is now in the British Museum (8407.g.l5). The following note, signed John Clarke, Salisbury, 17 April 1750, explains the purpose of the annotations: “The Relig. of Nature Delineated being a book in great esteem with her late Majesty Q. Caroline, she was pleased to command me to translate the notes into English for her own use: and there being a demand for a new edition, it was thought proper to publish this translation, as these notes are illustrations and confirmations of the sentiments of the learned authors, therefore I have consented to the publishing of them.”
10 I began a book-length study of the subject in 1938 but was forced to abandon it because of military and administrative duties.
11 From the English translation in 1795 by Nahum Tate and others. The interest in botany shown by Cowley here and in his poem “The Garden of J. Evelyn, Esq.,” as well as his proposal for a philosophical college that anticipated our “institute of advanced studies” (A Proposition for the Advancement of Experimental Philosophy, London, 1661), reveal a deep interest in science by Cowley that has not been fully appreciated by modern critics. See Jean Loiseau, Abraham Cowley: Sa vie, son œuvre (Paris, 1931).
12 For a history and commentary, see G. Chaplin Child, Benedicite: Or the Song of the Three Children, 2 vols. (London, 1866).
13 Preface to “Song of the Three Children Paraphras'd” in Poems on Several Occasions, 3rd ed. (London, 1722), pp. 142 ff. Her interest in science and her ability to write rhapsodies on nature sometimes better than the much-quoted ones of Shaftesbury may be seen in her Essays upon Several Subjects in Prose and Verse (London, 1710), esp. pp. 180 ff. For comment on her religious verse, see Fairchild, Religious Trends in English Poetry, I, 241–246 (n. 2, above).
14 The Poems of Anne Countess of Winchilsea, ed. Myra Reynolds (Chicago, 1903), pp. 262–264. See also pp. cxxi–cxxxiv for comment.
15 Merrick, Poems on Sacred Subjects (Oxford, 1763), pp. 1–10. See Robert E. Brittain, “An Early Model for Smart's ‘A Song to David!‘,” PMLA, LVI (1941), 165–174, based on the earlier anonymous appearance of the poem in Dodsley's Museum, ii (1746), 182.
10 A Paraphrase on the Song of the Three Children: In Irregular Stanzas (London, 1724).
17 Poems, 2nd ed. (London, 17S6), pp. 4–17. See also “A Soliloquy,” pp. 153–167.
18 Poems on Several Occasions (Oxford).
19 Poems on Several Occasions (London, 1733), pp. 39 ff., 135 ff.
20 Poems (London, 1786), I, 103 ff. The anonymous Hymn to God (London: R. Dodsley, 1746) paraphrases many ideas from the Psalms, e.g., praise of God by the lion, elephant, rhinoceros, and whale.
21 The Collected Poems of Christopher Smart, ed. Norman Callan, 2 vols. (London, 1949) is the most nearly complete edition. The introduction and notes by Robert Brittain to his edition of selected poems (Princeton, 1950) contains the best criticism of Smart's poetry as well as a summary of previous scholarship. The best edition of Jubilate Agno is that of W. H. Bond (Harvard Univ. Press, 1954), acknowledging the contribution of W. F. Stead when he published the poem for the first time in Rejoice in the Lamb (London, 1939).
22 “A Paraphrase of Parts of the 38th and 39th Chapters of Job,” Miscellaneous Poems and Translations by Several Hands (London: B. Lintot, 1712), pp. 102–108.
23 Poems on Several Occasions, 2nd ed. (London, 1739), p. 154.
24 New Theory of the Earth (London, 1696). A prospectus of a proposed compendium of learned information on Biblical matters quotes these and other authorities in its 66-page folio sample, a summary of the poetic and scientific accounts of the creation written before 1728: Jonathan Smedley, A Specimen of an Universal View of all the Eminent Writers on the Holy Scriptures (London, 1728). It is interesting that he quotes 18 lines from Milton and 102 from Blackmore's Creation.
25 Nicholas Amhurst, “the Mosaic Creation,” Poems on Several Occasions (1720), pp. 1–13; Edward Stephens, “On Creation and Providence,” Poems on Various Subjects (1759), pp. 99–107; and a section of Samuel Beeston's Immanuel (1789), pp. 16–19, are fairly close paraphrases of Genesis with occasional scientific interest.
26 Miscellaneous Works in Prose and Verse, 5th ed. (London, 1772), i, 7–11, 142 f.
27 The Atheist (London, 1723), pp. 8–12.
28 Christianity the Light of the Moral World: A Poem (1745). His notes show a considerable acquaintance with the work of Newton, Derham, Wollaston, Burnet, Bentley, Clarke, and others.
29 A Collection of Divine Hymns and Poems on Several Occasions (1709), pp. 22 ff.
30 The Power of Harmony: A Poem in Two Books (1745), p. 35.
31 See Albert Rosenberg, Sir Richard Blackmore: A Poet and Physician of the Augustan Age (Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1953), esp. pp. 98–108.
32 Victor Harris, All Coherence Gone (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1949), documents thoroughly these changes in the idea of the decay of nature.
33 Miscellaneous Works in Prose and Verse, I, 86–92.
34 See Courtney Melmoth, Observations on the Night Thoughts of Dr. Young (1776), esp. pp. 195 ff. on the last judgment.
35 Mary Masters has one in her Poems on Several Occasions (1733), pp. 186 ff., and Uvedale, The Death-bed Displayed, with the State of the Dead: A Sacred Poem (1727), pp. 4 f., compares the dissolution of the body with that of the world and gives a vivid description of the confusion of nature in the final ruin. Thomas Hobson, Christianity the Light of the Modern World (1745), p. 55, uses dissolution as darkness against which Christian philosophy is secure:
There, like a mariner, repos'd on shore,
See storms of atoms burst from warring worlds;
See planets tumbling wildly from their spheres,
And nature's last convulsing pangs of death.
36 Thomas Newcomb, The Consummation: A Sacred Ode on the Final Dissolution of the World, and an anonymous “Ode on the Last Day” in The Noctuary: Or an Address from the Tombs.
37 A Poem on the Earthquake at Lisbon (1755), p. 11.
38 Musae Seatonianae (Cambridge, 1808), i, 71–82, 299–320.