What Is a Poem? Coleridge on Science vs. Romance, 1817

“It is discriminated by proposing to itself such delight from the whole as is compatible with a distinct gratification from each component part.”

“True poetic practice implies a mind so miraculously attuned and illuminated that it can form words, by a chain of more-than coincidences, into a living entity,” Edward Hirsch wrote in his treatise on how to read a poem. “Poetry must resemble prose, and both must accept the vocabulary of their time,” W. B. Yeats argued in his 1936 meditation on modern poetry. But what, exactly, is a poem? In Biographia Literaria (public library; public domain), originally published in 1817 and now available as a free Kindle download, English poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge offers an eloquent definition:

A poem contains the same elements as a prose composition; the difference, therefore, must consist in a different combination of them, in consequence of a different object proposed. The mere addition of meter does not in itself entitle a work to the name of poem, for nothing can permanently please which does not contain in itself the reason why it is so and not otherwise. Our definition of a poem may be thus worded. “A poem is that species of composition which is opposed to works of science, by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth; and from all other species (having this object in common with it) it is discriminated by proposing to itself such delight from the whole as is compatible with a distinct gratification from each component part.”

For, in a legitimate poem, the parts must mutually support and explain each other; all in their proportion harmonizing with, and supporting the purpose and known influences of, metrical arrangement.

And yet, the notion that a poem is diametrically opposed to science — while appropriate in the context of Coleridge’s time, as he pioneered the Romantic Movement — seems tragically reductionist today. What of Dianne Ackerman’s beautiful poems about the planets of the Solar System? Or life science professor and clock researcher Mary E. Harrintong’s poetic ode to bioluminescent creatures? Or physicist J. W. V. Storey’s scientific paper published as a 38-stanza poem? Perhaps the mesmerism of poetry, like that of science, lives in that magical place of systematic wonder.

In fact, Coleridge was rather opposed to innovation in poetry, accusing modern poets of having substituted substance of message for gimmickry of medium:

One great distinction between even the characteristic faults of our elder poets and the false beauties of the moderns is this. In the former, from Donne to Cowley, we find the most fantastic out-of-the-way thoughts, but the most pure and genuine mother English; in the latter, the most obvious thoughts, in language the most fantastic and arbitrary. Our faulty elder poets sacrificed the passion, and passionate flow of poetry, to the subtleties of intellect and to the starts of wit; the moderns to the glare and glitter of a perpetual yet broken and heterogeneous imagery. The one sacrificed the heart to the head, the other both heart and head to drapery.

It was precisely Coleridge’s cult of precision and knowledge at the expense of abstraction and beauty that inspired John Keats to come up with the concept of “negative capability”, advocating for comfort with uncertainty and nimbleness amidst changing context — a skill later advanced by poets and scientists alike.

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Stardust: A Mesmerizing Short Film About the Voyager 1 and the Wonder of the Universe

The breathtaking beauty and destruction of the cosmos, animated.

“Everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was … lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam,” Carl Sagan observed in his timelessly poetic Pale Blue Dot monologue, titled after the iconic photograph of Earth taken in 1990 by the Voyager 1 — the spacecraft launched in 1977 that gave us the story of how Sagan fell in love and went on to become as the first man-made object to travel out of the Solar System, an eternal witness to the unimaginable beauty and brutality of the universe.

From Dutch designer and director Mischa Rozema comes Stardust — a breathtaking short film based on a combination of real NASA footage and science fiction imagery, celebrating the legacy of the Voyager 1 and inspired by Dutch graphic designer Arjan Groot, who passed away from cancer at the age of 39. For maximum goosebumps, immerse yourself in full-screen mode:

Rozema tells us:

I wanted to show the universe as a beautiful but also destructive place. It’s somewhere we all have to find our place within. As a director, making Stardust was a very personal experience but it’s not intended to be a personal film and I would want people to attach their own meanings to the film so that they can also find comfort based on their own histories and lives.

The original score by Guy Amitai is available on iTunes, with 100% of proceeds benefiting the Dutch Cancer Society.

Complement with Neil deGrasse Tyson on whether the universe has a purpose.

↬It’s Okay To Be Smart

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The Age of Edison: Radical Invention and the Illuminated World

A brief history of giving the people what they wanted, or why the lightbulb was a mere cog in the machinery of total illumination.

In 1880, a short segment of Broadway from Madison Square to Union Square was transformed into the “Great White Way” when twenty-three arc lights were switched on at nightfall, burning until sunrise the next day.

The light itself was overwhelming. The New York Times reported:

The great white outlines of the marble stores, the mess of wire overhead, the throng of moving vehicles, were all brought out with an accuracy and exactness that left little to be desired.

Women shielded themselves from the light using umbrellas. One person described the scene in horror:

People looked ghastly — like so many ghosts flitting about.

The harsh brightness of the arc lights required that they be hoisted between 20 and 50 feet in the air, throwing the city into dramatic light and shadow. People appeared gaunt and washed out, and the light exposed every skin imperfection. The experience of the arc lamp was like standing under a watchtower, and the street now had one on every corner. New York had been transformed into a prison, not a playground.

Light had come to the American city. And it was just awful.

In The Age of Edison: Electric Light and the Invention of Modern America (public library), Ernest Freeberg explains that the invention of electric light was not simply the invention of the light bulb — rather, it was the introduction of an entirely new way of life: the experience of illumination.

A night view of the Paris Exposition of 1900

Image courtesy Brooklyn Museum

Thomas Edison, in fact, wasn’t the first to invent the lightbulb — in one form or another, electric light had been in existence since the turn of the nineteenth century when Sir Humphry Davy — a British scientist who had previously intoxicated himself with nitrous oxide — demonstrated the first arc light to the Royal Society in 1810. The arc light was named for the brilliant white light that appeared when an electrical current jumped the gap between two carbon rods. Davy’s effect was brief but brilliant, and the scientist made no effort to distribute the light on a grand scale.

Sir Humphry Davy experimenting with a voltaic battery

Image courtesy Chemical Heritage Foundation

The arc light was powerful and effective; it became the standard application for inventors who wanted to distribute light to small towns and big cities across the U.S. It could blast away the shadows in Grand Central Station and it could light up an area for miles with a single strobe. San Jose and Austin constructed “moonlight towers,” roughly the size of a modern cell phone tower, to cast a white-hot glow over their city streets and combat crime. For the civic-minded, darkness was the criminal and the arc light was the policeman.

The first arc light tower, constructed in San Jose, California in 1881

Image courtesy Wikimedia

The incandescent light bulb was much more fragile an invention, relying on a glowing filament whose lasting power was unreliable. It was, however, the glow that Edison obsessively sought out. Edison didn’t invent incandescence either, but his goal was to make a bulb that glowed steadily, and that could glow in tandem with others.

Edison the man was an emblem for his entire workshop: hundreds of engineers and patents, a mountain of discarded materials, a thousand promises and false starts, millions of dollars in potential profit and market domination.

Edison and his workshop always invented in full view of the public. He would throw open the doors of his laboratory in Menlo Park, ready to reveal another rung in the ladder of human progress, only to shut himself up again when the newspapers questioned the efficiency of his inventions. The news from Menlo Park, much like the news from Cupertino today — and from Bell Labs in the mid-twentieth century — could affect the stock market on a grand scale.

The gas companies had the most to lose from the invention of a successful Edison lighting grid.

Image courtesy the New York Public Library

In late 1879, Edison opened the doors to his laboratory to introduce the prototype of his incandescent light, capable of burning for up to three hundred hours. The bulb itself was not particularly special — hundreds of bulbs with varying filaments had been invented and discarded over the years. What made Edison’s light different, however, was a quality that couldn’t be measured in dollars: it was beautiful.

According to one newspaper, the lightbulb was “a little globe of sunshine” which produced “a bright, beautiful light, like the mellow glow of an Italian sunset.” It was also the first light that had a single sensory experience. For thousands of years, light had been the product of wood, tallow, gas, or coal — where there was smoke, there was light. A newspaper reported of Edison’s bulb:

There is no flicker… There is nothing between it and darkness. It consumes no air and, of course, does not vitiate any. It has no odor or color.

Cities and towns did not simply crave light — the arc light was the brightest and boldest light a person could experience — they craved the right light. Edison’s incandescent bulb was not the brightest, but it had the glow that the public desired. Edison devised a system of lighting, a string of incandescent bulbs that ran on parallel circuits — ensuring that one outage wouldn’t collapse the system — driven by an enormous dynamo that allowed an even brightness across a vast field. Edison didn’t simply envision a bulb, he envisioned a grid, and he hooked his lighting into the tangle of telegraph wires, phone lines, and police alarms that already ran through the city.

The Edison Electric Tower was a pillar of incandescent light designed to showcase the glow of the Edison bulb. It was a popular feature of the General Electric exhibit at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago

Image courtesy Field Museum

The great shift from darkness into light during the nineteenth century wasn’t due to the invention of the lightbulb, but the invention of illumination and the experience of light on a grand scale. A well-lit room was not a novelty. A well-lit street, a building sprinkled with light, a lighthouse with a brilliant beam — these were the signposts of an illuminated world. Men and women would begin to stay out later into the night. Constant illumination meant a longer workday, for some driven by economic need, while others simply craved it.

The illuminated world transformed the literary sphere, too. With more people outside during the night, there were more stories to cover, more life to unfold. Newspapers began to publish multiple daily editions, both because they could and because the public hungered for it. The factory worker and the newspaper reporter began to intensify their “night work” and the now-familiar 24-hour workday began to take shape.

The Great Search Light and Electric Tower at the Pan American Exposition, held in Buffalo in 1901.

Image courtesy the New York Public Library

The Age of Edison is the story of invention and experience, in which the race to light America was not for the brightest light, but the best, and the smartest. In the end, Edison’s incandescent bulb prevailed — not simply because it was the most beautiful light, but also because it was the savviest.

Michelle Legro is an associate editor at Lapham’s Quarterly. You can find her on Twitter.

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