“Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge,” William Wordsworth famously wrote in the Preface to the 1802 version of Lyrical Ballads. “[I]t is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science. Emphatically it may be said of the Poet, as Shakespeare hath said of man, ‘that he looks before and after.‘ He is the rock of defence of human nature; an upholder and preserver, carrying every where with him relationship and love” (xxxvii).