No “Idle Fancy:” The Imagination’s Work in Poetry and Natural Philosophy from Sidney to Sprat by Jacqueline L. Cowan Department of English Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Leonard Tennenhouse, Supervisor ___________________________ Andrew Janiak ___________________________ Maureen Quilligan ___________________________ Charlotte Sussman Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University 2015 i v ABSTRACT No “Idle Fancy:” The Imagination’s Work in Poetry and Natural Philosophy from Sidney to Sprat by Jacqueline L. Cowan Department of English Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Leonard Tennenhouse, Supervisor ___________________________ Andrew Janiak ___________________________ Maureen Quilligan ___________________________ Charlotte Sussman An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University 2015 i v Copyright by Jacqueline L. Cowan 2015 Abstract When debating the structure of the cosmos, Raphael delivers to Adam perhaps Milton’s most famous line: “be lowly wise.” With the promise to “justify the ways of God to men,” Milton does not limit man’s knowledge to base matters, but reclaims the heights of “other worlds” for the poet. Over the course of the seventeenth century, the natural philosophers’ material explanations of the natural order were slowly gaining authority over other sources of knowledge, the poets prime among them. My dissertation takes up the competing early modern claims to knowledge that Milton lays down for Adam. I argue that natural philosophy, what today we call “science,” emerged as the dominant authority over knowledge by appropriating the poet’s imagination. The poet’s imagination had long revealed the divine hand that marked nature—a task that, as Sidney put it, merited the poet a “peerlesse” rank among other professions. For Bacon, Galileo, and Royal Society fellows, the poetic imagination revealed material explanations of nature’s order that other orthodox models and methods could not. For the first decades of the seventeenth century, the imagination aligned poetry and natural philosophy as complementary pursuits of knowledge: Sidney’s poet was to imagine a “golden” world that revealed the divine order, the material cause of which Bacon’s natural philosopher was to discover in nature. But as the Royal Society fellows countered the claim that they peddled fancies, they severed ties with the poet. In one ingenious rhetorical move, Royal Society fellows proclaimed themselves to have iv perfected the poet’s imaginative work, securing the imagination for natural philosophy while disavowing poetry as the product of an idle fancy. Such rhetoric proved as powerful then as it does now. For Margaret Cavendish, the poet occupies the supplemental role that “recreate[s] the mind” once it grows tired of the “serious” natural philosophical studies. After the Restoration, then, the important role of the poetic imagination would go largely unrecognized even as it set itself to work in what would become the separate disciplines of literature and science. v Dedication To those who keep my feet grounded and my eyes on the horizon, Kamran Ahmed, Ken Cowan, and Kaila Brown. vi Contents Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... iv Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................... vii Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………1 1. Upon Common Grounds: Bacon’s Poetry and Shakespeare’s Natural Philosophy ...... 16 2. Imagining the Moon in Fact and Fiction…………………………………………………...70 3. “Naked” Prose and its Body of Poetry ............................................................................... 128 4. To be “Lowly Wise” at the Height of Discovery .............................................................. 189 Bibliography .............................................................................................................................. 229 Biography ................................................................................................................................... 240 vii Acknowledgements First and foremost, I am indebted to my team of committed and brilliant advisors. Maureen Quilligan brought life to old materials and taught me how to see the best in all things, not the least this dissertation. Charlotte Sussman provided an exemplary model of kindness and grace under pressure. Her guidance has eased the many challenges that have transpired over the last six years. When confronted with dense philosophical material, Andrew Janiak rendered complex ideas accessible, lucid, and exciting. His enthusiasm for natural philosophy continues to affirm my own. Special thanks to Leonard Tennenhouse, who kept me afloat with his keen wit, pragmatic advice, and more than a little of his patience. His tireless dedication to this project and my academic development has made a world of difference. I could not have imagined a better dissertation director and I have been made all the stronger for his stellar advising. I am also grateful to Clinton Smith, Leslie Thomson, Colin Hill, Mari Ruti, Alexandra Gillespie, Tyler Tokaryk, and, especially, Igor Djordjevic for building the confidence I needed to start this journey in the first place. This dissertation has received generous support from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Myra and William Waldo Boone Fellowship. I am also grateful for the helpful feedback from the editors at Studies in viii Philology; their comments added strength and scope to many of my arguments and ideas. Finally, I would like to acknowledge my beloved family and friends. Many heartfelt thanks are in order to: Linda and Royce, who have both provided sustenance, support, and love; to my grandfather, whose enthusiasm for life lifts me to new heights; to the Pawlowskis, who have cared for me; to Clare Callahan, George Vahamikos, and Whitney Trettien, who have all been instrumental in my growth as an academic and as a person; to Kamran Ahmed, who has been a pillar of support, a brilliant source of inspiration, and the truest companion; to Theia, whose stoic, yet sweet, disposition offers me endless comfort; and to Cameron Christou, who knows how to put a smile on my face, whatever the circumstance. ix Introduction “The cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be. Our contemplation of the cosmos stirs us .… We know we are approaching the grandest of mysteries.” In these opening lines to the popular 1980s television show Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (lines repeated in the hugely successful 2014 reboot, no less), Carl Sagan waxes poetic about the world revealed to us by science. Scientists often make recourse to the language of poets to defend science, arguing that science can uncover nature’s most hidden wonders. For the last twenty years, Richard Dawkins has gone to great lengths to champion this line of scientific rhetoric. His Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion, and the Appetite for Wonder (1998) is a riposte against the claim that science denudes the world of meaning beyond its material substrates.1 Far from a means to disenchant the world or, as Keat’s put it, “unweave a rainbow,”2 Dawkins argues that science whets the “imagination” (16), drives us to seek new knowledge of nature, and ultimately reveals a wondrous world worthy of awe. “The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us,” he writes, “is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver” (x). 1 Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion, and the Appetite for Wonder (New York: First Mariner Books, 1998). Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number(s). 2 John Keats, “Lamia,” in John Keats Selected Poems, ed. John Barnard (London: Penhuin Books, 2007), line 237. 1 Dawkins advocates a closer relationship between the poets, whom he considers the traditional source of wonder and enchantment, and scientists, whose understanding of the material world he thinks should merit aesthetic appreciation. Dawkins summarizes his vision for poets and scientists without sparing alliteration: It is my thesis that poets could better use the inspiration provided by science and that at the same time scientists must reach out to the constituency that I am identifying with, for lack of a better word, poets. It is not, of course, that science should be declaimed in verse. Simple, sober clarity will do nicely, letting the facts and the ideas speak for themselves. The poetry is in the science. (17-18) Dawkins’ “thesis,” however, is over three hundred years old. In 1667, Thomas Sprat, a founding fellow of the Royal Society, made the same argument in an attempt to establish its natural philosophy, what today we would consider “science,” as the dominant authority over knowledge of nature. Because modern science is widely acknowledged as the only reliable source for knowledge of the natural world, it is easy to forget that “science” once struggled to validate its practices in various circles of orthodox authority. Scholastics criticised Society fellows