Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-v9fdk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T04:00:56.849Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Brooke's Universal Beauty and Modern Thought

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 February 2021

Lionel Stevenson*
Affiliation:
University of California

Extract

After science in the modern sense of the term began to infiltrate the public consciousness in the second half of the seventeenth century, and men were stirred by the new concept of the universe revealed by Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton, the lesser poets seized joyfully on this inexhaustible source of fresh material and combined pedestrian exposition with ecstatic praise in setting forth the new vision of God's handiwork afforded by the discoveries of science. Among those who thus undertook to interpret the results of science in verse were Young, Akenside, Thomson, and Richard Savage, as well as many lesser writes.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 43 , Issue 1 , March 1928 , pp. 198 - 209
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1928

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Carson S. Duncan, The New Science and English Literature in the Classical Period, Menasha, Wis., 1913.

2 Ibid., pp. 139, 143.

3 English Literature, an Illustrated Record, III, 284. Gosse probably derived article in The Dublin University Magazine of February, 1852, in which it is said that the poem suggested The Botanic Garden of Erasmus Darwin.

4 Guardian, 55, 70, 77, 83,88, 89, etc. Note that even the defender of the spiritual cause stresses the material benefits of orthodoxy and appeals to common sense and self-interest.

5 Surely the reading should be “mastiff,” as antecedent to “he.” G. A. Aitkin's transcript of the original MS (Works of Arbuthnot, Oxford, 1892) gives “mastifs,” which could easily be a misreading of an “f” a5-a long “s.”

7 7 The Works of the E1f,glish Poets (1810), xvii, 333.

8 Lacrymae Musarum.

9 The Barrel Organ.

10 Frolic.

11 The Signature of All Things, Everyman's library edition, p. 210.

12 See G. R. Potter, Coleridge and the Idea of Evolution, PMLA, XL, 382.