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Science and Poetry

'Too often modern literature is the writer's announcement of his revenge on a society from which he is alienated.' This pertinent remark comes towards the end of Professor B. Ifor Evans's Literature and Science (London, 1954). All great poets were men of wide experience in the life of their times, but were not committed and thus narrowed in scope by dogma. They were interpretative without final commitments. The Elizabethans had the philosopher's stone: they could transmute anything. But sciencegradually assumed far too great an importance with imaginative and creative men and in the eighteenth century culminated probably with Francis Darwin's 'Loves of the Plants'. The Romantics were aware, but, because of the strength of the alliance between their poetry and their lives as men, were also wary. Tennyson in 'In Memoriam' found a catalyst, but the contemporary inheritance that instinctively takes the case history as its creative basis perpetuates the spurious values of science in the realm of creative art. 'Yeats showed a way how, without dogma, the poet can re-affirm a value in life and a depth in experience. He marked out a territory for the writer which is distinct from that of the rationalist or man of science. It is from such a background that the new humanism might develop. We must return to the ancient sources of wisdom in the art of literature and in the world of the imagination, uniting what we can achieve in our own time with the past.' More than a hundred years ago there was a dispute which was taken to be between science and religion and was serious enough to cause many thoughtful people to 'lose their faith'. In retrospect we can see that the main trouble was that each side claimed a monopoly of truth. Christian theologians, most of them, assumed that everything in their tradition was of the nature of Holy Writ, though some of it was obsolete scientific theory. Scientists on their side, most of them, claimed the more fashionable kinds of scientific theory to be Holy Writ of another kind. Now, few theologians would claim to know for certain that the process of creating the universe