Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Complementary ...

... The science of poetry, the poetry of science | Books | The Guardian. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Maybe the relationship between poetry and science provokes passion because it is parental. Poetry was the first written way we addressed such questions as what is the world made of, and how did it come to be? In the sixth and fifth centuries BC, the pre-socratics reworked these questions, writing on physics, chemistry, geology, astronomy, theology, metaphysics and epistemology; and often in verse. Science was born in poetry. Lucretius's epic on atoms, On the Nature of Things continued this tradition; so did the 18th-century doctor Erasmus Darwin, whose poem "The Temple of Nature" outlined a theory of evolution, following life-forms from micro-organisms to human society.

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