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Relationships Between Light and Literature (A Book in Progress)

Many people assume that any relationship between literature and science goes in one direction - science influences literature. In fact, the relationship is more complex than that, and more interesting. Here we will explore three ways in which the evolving science of light and the tradition of literature, particularly poetry, intersect. The first looks at how light and literature were once conceived as inherently similar. The second looks at how literature often ignores the scientific understanding of light and replaces it with unscientific symbolic structures, some of which remain visible in literature today. The third returns to the assumption that science influences literature, and examines more accurately some examples of that influence to put it in perspective as one of many aspects of the science-literature relationship.

1: The Coincidence of Light and Literature

The word "literature" did not emerge until the 14th century, but verbal composition of course already had a rich history. We call Homer's epics "literature" but no equivalent term existed around the time they were composed between the 8th and 10th centuries BC. His epics were oral, not written, and even to say they were composed by "Homer" is probably inaccurate -- they were the result of generations of verbal activity, recording as much of significant Greek culture as possible to create a memorizable history in the absence of any written record. The motivation was probably historical and utilitarian, that is, rather than what we would now call "literary." Yet Homer's Iliad and Odyssey followed an extraordinary mixture of predetermined and unprescribed rules for their composition, and depended upon the technical agility of their tellers (or, more probably, singers) for their existence and continual modification. In fact, the term the Greeks would have used in Homer's time to refer to those epics is techne, meaning "to produce by letting appear."

The concept of technical skill is there in the term, but more notable is the idea that such a verbal construct permits something to appear. What is that something? For the Greeks of that time it was "truth," whose own term was aletheia, or "unveiling." The later term poiesis was a result of the emerging classification of artistic genres by Plato and Aristotle; it means "to make," a short jump from the spirit of the original techne. Thus poetry, to the ancient Greek imagination, makes an unveiling of truth, lets the truth appear; the encompassing metaphor in the terminology is light, responsible for things appearing and being unveiled. Thus by the 4th century BC poetry is that which "shines bright . . . and resplends." Plato, the author of that definition (in his Phaedrus), believed that this material world obscures truth, which can only be accessed by piercing the veil of illusion that our senses erect. Plato famously waffled on the issue of who was to do the piercing, but the "seer" or poet often got the nod. Not the "seer" who sees with the eyes, necessarily, but the one who "sees" through the distracting veil of the senses to the truth that lies beyond. Such "sight" is metaphorical -- the ability goes beyond the sense of sight enabled by the eye to a more profound dimension of human understanding. To emphasize this, cultures often devised figures with such sight to be literally blind, such as the mythical Tiresias, or Homer himself.

The cultural intersection between poetry and light, truth and sight, understanding and appearance, had been forged at this early stage in the evolution of what we now call "literature." It also permeates the Bible, in which language is introduced in the context of truth, life and light in John 1: 1-5 ("In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. . . . Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life; and life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it"). In Western literature, Platonic and Biblical systems of thought and belief converge in Dante's Divine Comedy of the 14th century, a poem in which light is summoned for an identical purpose. This is particularly evident in the third part, the Paradiso, where Dante reaches heaven; the Paradiso opens with light imagery -- "The glory of Him who moves all things penetrates the universe and shines in one part more and in another less" -- that saturates the next 5,000 lines of the poem. When Beatrice, the object of the pilgrim Dante's physical and eventually spiritual desire, explains the Christian concept of divine love to him, the binding metaphors connect it with sight, light and truth:

Open now thine eyes to the answer I give thee and thou shalt see that thy belief and my words meet in the truth as the centre of the circle.

That which dies not and that which can die are nothing but the splendour of that Idea which our Sire, in Loving, begets; for that living Light which so streams from its shining Source that it is not parted from it nor from the love which with them makes the Three, of its own goodness gathers its beams . . .

. . . I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.

Both light and poetry represented the most mysterious and most profound of truths, possibly because neither was understood -- the source of poetry was as inexplicable as the source of light. The poet's ritual of invoking a muse to inspire and sustain the poetic act was a version of the same fascination with the source of such creativity. That tradition, which we see as early as Homer's Odyssey and which peaks in the Renaissance, is employed by Milton in 1667 in the famous opening to Book Three of Paradise Lost. There Milton transforms the Homeric technique of invoking a mythological goddess as a muse into an invocation of light itself as the source for poetic inspiration and power, so as to continue his epic explaining "the ways of God to men":

Hail holy light, offspring of Heav'n first-born,
Or of th'Eternal Coeternal beam
May I express thee unblamed? Since God is light,
And never but in unapproachéd Light
Dwelt from eternity, dwelt then in thee,
Bright effluence of bright essence increate.

The equation connecting light, religion, truth and the poet seems to persist, with varying emphasis on different parts of it, through Western literature of subsequent centuries. When Percy Shelley meditates upon the creative principle in his 1815 "Hymn of Apollo," he uses the Greek god of arts and prophecy as his metaphor. Otherwise known as Phoebus, meaning "shining," Apollo is not only a source of light in Shelley's poem but also its destination, the eye:

I am the eye with which the Universe
Beholds itself and knows itself divine;
All harmony of instrument or verse,
All prophecy, all medicine is mine,
All light of art or nature; -- to my song
Victory and praise in its own right belong.

A drainless shower
Of light is poesy; 'tis the supreme of power;
'Tis might half slumb'ring on its own right arm.

In their fusion of light and creativity, 20th century poems often make a similar return to the tradition that connects poetry and light. Toward the end of his life Dylan Thomas called poetry "the movement from an overclothed blindness to a naked vision" and regarded his own as "the record of my individual struggle from darkness towards some measure of light." He described that struggle in his 1946 poem "In My Craft or Sullen Art" where he again invoked light as the best parallel to the poetic act:

In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms
I labour by singing light . . .

2: Light as a Symbol in Literature

The relationship between light and literature involves more than the use of light as an image in some literary texts. Light is the natural world's manifestation of what literature does -- reveal what otherwise remains hidden from us or goes unnoticed by us in our lives. Literature need not reveal only the most spectacular of verities, though, such as Dante's spiritual journey or Milton's explanation to man of God's ways. It can also unveil what is so familiar to us that we lose sight of it; it can take the ordinary and make us see it again as if for the first time. This helps explain the motivation behind a simple poem such as William Carlos Williams' "So much depends/ upon/ a red wheelbarrow," the opening lines to his famous 1923 poem "The Red Wheelbarrow." We expect literature to be complex and difficult -- otherwise, somehow, it isn't literature. This reflex on our part has a lot to do with what literature we are taught and how we are taught it. Shakespeare is complex and difficult and so is Milton, and their works seem unquestionably to qualify as literature. Williams' poem, on the other hand, seems perversely simplistic to some, and not worthy of the category. In fact, so-called "New Criticism" that began in the 1920s in the United States and influenced poetry reading for the greater part of this century assigned "literature" the role of being complex, ambiguous and coherent. If a text did not contain all of those attributes, the New Critical assumption went, it must not be literature.

One of the reasons literature seems complex is that it often communicates through codes -- sets of symbols and conventions we need to know to understand the work. If we did not read with attention to these codes, a literary text could seem rather stupid. William Blake's "The Sick Rose," that begins with the line "O Rose, thou art sick," requires us to accept that in the world of literature a person can talk directly to a rose without making a fool of himself. It also asks that we recognize that the rose carries a wealth of significance that a dandelion does not. It is often difficult to say why those significances are there for us. Why does black carry negative connotations of evil, or green convey the emotion of envy, for instance? Light is one of those symbols that literature uses on the assumption that the reader will decode it as meaning something more in a text than it does in the world. Its many meanings may indeed come from the traditional close relationship between light and literature -- truth, revelation, understanding, insight and so on. In fact, it becomes difficult to find words for these things that do not use the concepts of light and sight somehow (and they are used frequently here, yet we are so familiar with them that the fact they are symbols goes unnoticed) . "Insight" is one example. To "see" something as a form of understanding it is another.

It would not be difficult to find examples of light used in literature as a symbol for things like knowledge or life itself. When Shakespeare's Othello is about to kill Desdemona he says ". . . she must die, else she'll betray more men./ Put out the light, and then put out the light." When we decode this curious repetition we realize that he means "quench the candle" and then "kill Desdemona" respectively; "light" in this case means both a flame by which to see, and her very life. Light is also frequently used as a symbol for positive things, and its opposite, darkness, for negative things. Again, examples abound. Satan is black, God is blindingly bright. Horrifying acts occur under cover of darkness, whereas acts of revelation occur in light. There's no practical reason for Mary Shelley's Victor Frankenstein to bring his creation to life at midnight as he does -- he could just as easily have built it at noon -- but because the creature initially seems horrific the timing makes symbolic sense. Milton, in his 1633 masque Comus, writes that

He that has light within his own clear breast
May sit i' th'centre and enjoy bright day;
But he that hides a dark soul and foul thoughts
Benighted walks under the midday sun.

These symbolic codes are quite routine, and we encounter them in literature frequently. There are a couple of other symbolic readings of light, though, that are particularly fascinating. One involves the relationship between light and time, the other between light and space. Henry Vaughan, writing in the seventeenth century, describes eternity as "a ring of pure and endless light" in his poem "Silex Scintillans":

I saw Eternity the other night,
Like a ring of pure and endless light,
     All calm, as it were bright;
And round beneath it,
Time in hours, days, years,
Driv'n by the spheres
Like a vast shadow moved . . .

. . . the light is still
At the still point of the turning world.

3: Interactions between Literature's Light and Science's Light

Usually, though, the argument has been the reverse: Einstein's theories have influenced literature and other twentieth century artistic activities. The belief that Einstein's work on Relativity influenced Modern Cubism, for instance, is a popular example of the assumption that the true line of influence runs from science to art. According to this view, Einstein's merging of space and time stimulated artists such as Picasso in his Cubist period to display space as an energetic and unsettled dimension, and the act of perception as multiple and constantly fluctuating. Yet Cubism's most famous manifestos on a non-Euclidean fourth dimension (1910-11) pre-date the fully theorized concept of a space-time continuum (1915-16) by half a decade. And Picasso, Braque and the originators of Cubism were not aware of the most up-to-date scientific work Einstein, Minkowski and others were doing anyway. In Cubism's case, the artist's awareness of the scientist's work followed the usual delay (longer then, shorter now) determined by the pace of spreading information, and Einstein was not popularized by the press until the confirmation of the General Theory of Relativity after the eclipse of 1919, well after Cubism had come and gone.

The other possibility discussed a moment ago -- of literature expressing an intuitive connection between light and time and space that influenced twentieth century physics -- is in the strict sense equally remote. "Influence" is too strong a term to use in any case. However, the possibility that someone like Einstein was already conceptually available to the connection is not so far-fetched. Einstein himself was well acquainted with the Western literary and philosophic traditions that encouraged it. If the unilateral influence of science on literature is a myth, though, it would not be feasible to argue now that literature, instead, influences science. Science still influences science much more profoundly, just as literature is always far more indebted to its own predecessors than to scientific discovery. Newton recognized that his own accomplishments were enabled by the achievements of scientific thinkers before him, by his "standing on the shoulders of Giants." For T.S. Eliot "not only the best, but the most individual parts of [a writer's] work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously." The result of looking at the question of the relationship between science and literature, or more specifically light and literature, is that it is not a question of who most influences whom: influence and conceptual inducement run in many directions simultaneously.

A brief passage from Dylan Thomas's 1946 poem "Fern Hill" offers a good example of how literary tradition and scientific discovery can together shape a specific part of a poem. The narrator recalls how, as a child, he imagined the beginning of the world as "the birth of the simple light/ In the first, spinning place." One influence here seems to be the literary tradition, already discussed above, that introduces light as the centre of something spinning or turning. Thomas also introduces the dimension of time into this relationship of light and space through the word "first," generating the idea of timelessness (or, in this case, something before time) that we saw in T.S. Eliot's phrase "the still point in the turning world." Yet the "first, spinning place" probably also refers to the image of M31, popular by the poem's composition, the spinning disc-shaped Andromeda galaxy discovered by Edwin Hubble in 1924 that marked the furthest man had seen back to in time -- it is 2 million light years away. In the case of this poem, the literary tradition and scientific discovery converge to form a deceptively simple phrase.

One of the most active periods in the history of the science of light was the first half of the seventeenth century. Galileo's major work on the heavens and on telescopes peaked in the first two decades; Kepler's studies of lenses and the human eye occurred then, recorded in his 1611 Dioptrice, and partly in response to Galileo's work; Snel's law of refraction appeared in 1621; Descartes corroborated it in 1637; Fermat derived it mathematically in 1662. Why all this activity surrounding this particular area of optics is an interesting question: it represents the confluence of advances in lens making, mathematics, astronomical observation and surgical precision (Kepler dissected a human eye during his studies) among other things. The activity produced famous collaboration and controversy: Kepler wrote Conversation with the Sidereal Messenger in response to Galileo's own Sidereal Messenger; Fermat openly scorned Descartes' work. One of that century's most famous and prolific poets, John Donne, was particularly responsive to advances in a variety of sciences at the time. Recent geographical discoveries and the emerging science of map making permeate his work, and so does the accelerating study of optics and vision. One example is the opening stanza of his 1633 poem "A Valediction: Of Weeping":

Let me pour forth
       My tears before thy face whilst I stay here,
For thy face coins them, and thy stamp they bear,
And by this mintage they are something worth,
      For thus they be
      Pregnant of thee;
Fruits of much grief they are, emblems of more;
When a tear falls, that Thou falls which it bore,
So thou and I are nothing then, when on a diverse shore.

Another example of such indirect influence is in a poem called "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" written by the American poet Walt Whitman in 1856. (Indirect influence means that although a poet did not necessarily know of a specific body of work by a particular scientist, the poetry nevertheless contains imagery so reminiscent of that science at so similar a time in history that some awareness of it exists.) At one point in the poem the narrator looks into the water from the deck and

Saw the reflection of the summer sky in the water,
Had my eyes dazzled by the shimmering track of beams,
Look'd at the fine centrifugal spokes of light round the shape of
       my head in the sunlit water

When Newton late in life referred to himself as a "dwarf standing on the shoulders of Giants" one of the giants he no doubt had in mind was Kepler. From him Newton inherited the groundbreaking concept of mathematical laws governing the motions of the planets, and many of the optical formulations in the Dioptrice. Donne's occasional refraction, as it were, of Kepler's ideas in his poetry was about the closest thing to a eulogy Kepler received, three years after his death in 1630. Newton fared better in this regard: Pope eulogized him in the famous couplet "Nature and Nature's Laws lay hid in Night;/ God said, Let Newton be! and all was Light," in the process rewriting Genesis 1: 3. By the time Pope wrote his "Epitaph Intended for Sir Isaac Newton" in 1735 science was becoming a more familiar activity to an educated public. Its influence on literature grew, not surprisingly, yet the very fact that we can now talk about an influence reveals the separation between science and the arts being forged at that time. Dante's 14th century amalgamation of God, light and poetry (and the tradition fusing light and poetry preceding it) regarded what we would call science, religion and literature as coherent, inseparable. In fact, these terms (as we saw in the case of the word "literature") did not exist until the activities they now denote became distinct. To say of Dante's poetry that it was "influenced" by something exterior to itself in natural philosophy wouldn't have made any sense to him. Even Kepler, whose life reveals a frustration with religious assumptions contrary to logical inference and natural observation, was unwilling to remove astrology from his conception of the heavens. And in the last years of his life Newton wrote two religious books -- The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended and Observations upon the Prophesies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John. Yet the unmistakable chasm between a world conceived in spiritual terms and explained in physical ones widened after Kepler and even more after Newton. By the end of the 18th century science had become an entirely separate activity from the arts, and observations, proofs, axioms, theorems and discoveries were now firmly connected with the names of the people who achieved them -- a kind of intellectual property. And that 18th century explosion in the currency of science increased its profile in the popular imagination to this day.

Hence Whitman's poetic awareness of the phenomenon of diffraction. Hence Pope on Newton. Hence, too, James Thomson in his 1744 "To the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton":

Did ever poet image ought so fair,
Dreaming in whispering groves by the hoarse brook ...
How just, how beauteous the refractive law...?
[Newton] Untwisted all the shining robe of day
[And] to the charm'd eye educed the gorgeous train
Of parent-colours. First the flaming Red
Sprung vivid forth; the tawny Orange next . . .
. . . and then, of sadder hue,
Emerged the deepen'd Indigo, as when
The heavy-skirted evening droops with frost;
While the last gleamings of refracted light
Died in the fainting Violet away.

There are two notable responses to Thomson's enthusiasm for the beauty and truth in Newton's explanation of white light's spectrum. One is in "To the Rainbow" by Thomas Campbell, published in 1820:

Can all that optics teach, unfold
Thy form to please me so,
As when I dreamt of gems and gold
Hid in thy radiant bow?

The other response to Thomson's eulogy is by Keats, no stranger to the exploration of truth and beauty himself. His 1819 poem Lamia (published in 1820, the same years as Campbell's) is an allegory of the tension between rationality and the spirit -- between logic and aesthetics if you will -- that ends ambiguously with the privileging of neither. The poem marks a transition in Keats's writing where his optimistic view of love and desire turns more tragic -- where love leads, in fact, to death -- and is representative of the many poems such as "Ode to a Nightingale," "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" and The Fall of Hyperion written in a remarkable few months in that year of illness and impending death. Keats had studied to be a medical doctor until his vast poetic powers overcame any scientific ability he clearly had. The tension between these two sides of his enormous abilities would periodically reveal itself in his poetry; it is fascinating to me that it did not reveal itself more often, in fact. In Lamia we encounter his critical view of science in a brief and caustic passage that is at once a reference to Newton's optics and Thomson's "To the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton":

There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings,
Conquer the mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine --
Unweave a rainbow . . .

These three poets who wrote specifically about Newton conceive of him in terms of his work on the rainbow and the spectrum of white light; they aren't concerned with his Principia, for instance, or his work on gravity and momentum. This, possibly, is because of the profound tradition relating literature to light, not to gravity or inertia. And for Keats and Campbell, to "unweave a rainbow" is not only to reduce natural beauty to scientific fact; it is to dissect the physical analogue of literature itself -- light -- to divide and so to conquer it.

At the time Keats and Campbell wrote, in the early nineteenth century, scientific explanations of light still required a substance having some of the qualities of liquid or elastic solid for the light of the sun and stars to pass through in outer space: that substance was ether, a widely accepted yet unmeasurable medium. Although no one had been able to observe it, explanations of natural phenomena from light to gravity depended upon its existence. The 1778 Dictionary of Arts & Science defined it as "an imaginary fluid, supposed by several authors, both ancient and modern, to be the cause of gravity, heat, light, muscular motion, and, in a word, of every phaenomenon in nature." And over a century later it still remained for scientists "the all-important problem" (is it a solid or a liquid, and can it be observed?) in search of an explanation. Yet the famous experiment in 1887 by Albert Michelson and Edward Morley, designed to measure the ether wind sweeping past the moving earth, showed instead that no ether existed at all.

The result of the 1887 experiment was unexpected and alarming, and later experiments under more precise conditions were conducted in the hopes the first one contained errors. They too failed to reveal any ether, though, and scientists were forced to alter their suppositions concerning how light travels, precipitating the 20th century question of the duality of light's properties -- it operates both as a wave (requiring some medium for its transit) and as a particle. Einstein's work on relativity conceived of a universe in which the hypothetical existence of ether was unnecessary. Although, as he put it in a 1920 lecture "Ether and Relativity," the "hypothesis of ether in itself is not in conflict with the special theory of relativity," neither is it necessary to the special theory. It had become a moot point in a new conceptual universe.

Ether was no less difficult for poets to give up. From antiquity it had represented the soul or spirit (the word "ethereal," meaning insubstantial, is still synonymous with them), and Romantic poets like Keats and Wordsworth relied upon it frequently to represent a divine medium that flowed through an otherwise inconceivably empty outer space. In an 1841 essay on history Emerson used ether as a metaphor for eternity -- "Time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity of facts" -- and similar poetic reliance on the term for these various abstract entities extended well into the late 19th century. In fact, it served the same purpose in science and in poetry, supplying an imagined medium for the existence of two similarly mysterious verities -- light in science and the soul or spirit in literature. Its disappearance from the scientific imagination coincides with its decline from the poetic one, and by the 20th century literature contains no trace of ether, except parodically, in the famous opening to T.S. Eliot's 1915 "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock":

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky,
Like a patient etherized upon a table.

The absence of ether was no more significant a discovery than those of Copernicus or Galileo, of course, but by the 20th century scientific knowledge was becoming so widely disseminated that a writer who ignored it would, unlike Shakespeare who mostly ignored heliocentrism, seem at best quaint, at worst irrelevant. In a century increasingly dominated by scientific advance and technological competition, it was no longer an option for a writer to persist simply in believing in ether, or to pretend that outer space was benign and smoothed "the passage of an angel's tear."

Robert Frost, a poet otherwise quite influenced by the Romantics, illustrates how a 20th century writer could incorporate such scientific understanding into a poetic vision of despair and isolation. Frost had published "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening" in 1923, a serene vision of momentary isolation and peace. A year later the Andromeda nebula was discovered -- that first glimpse of a galaxy beyond the Milky Way -- and in 1929 Edwin Hubble proposed his "speed-proportional-to-distance" equation for receding galaxies, suggesting the expansion of the universe. Interstellar distances now assumed an almost incomprehensible scale, and it was clear that nothing so comforting as ether filled them. By 1936 Frost had evolved from the kind of poetry he wrote in 1923, and to assist him in articulating a world of emotional isolation and pain he invoked a universe both physics and astronomy had proved was no longer benign:

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars -- on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

This discussion threatens to move too far away from the relationship between light and literature into the much larger issue of the cultural dominance of 20th century sciences like astronomy and physics and of literature's responses to that issue. Instead, let us conclude by considering a passage written in the twentieth century that contains a sensitivity to recent developments in the science of light, primarily those involving the question of whether light acts as a wave or as a particle. In 1871 James Clerk Maxwell and Rayleigh published the results of their work that suggested light is comprised of particles that deflect electromagnetic radiation; later in the century Humphrey Lloyd and Gustave Kirchoff's experiments suggested that light vibrates in waves at right angles to its direction of travel. Together these late 19th century experiments resulted in the conundrum of wave-particle duality that persists today. Twentieth-century writers, of course, continue to use light as a symbol as was discussed earlier. These significances -- such as life, understanding, truth and so on -- will probably continue as long as human expression does. Yet light cannot be used exclusively as a symbol; at times a writer needs simply to describe it as a phenomenon of the senses without lending it some other meaning. In such routine cases, light is treated much like anything else that is part of the visible or aural or tactile world, uninformed by science because such information is irrelevant to the situation. Occasionally, however, a description will carry a sensitivity to science, not to challenge or approve it, but to lend accuracy and precision. In his 1929 novel The Sound and the Fury, for instance, William Faulkner describes the emerging light of early dawn, and its illumination of an elderly black woman Dilsey Gibson, in terms of particles and right-angle motion:

The day dawned bleak and chill, a moving wall of grey light out of the northeast which, instead of dissolving into moisture, seemed to disintegrate into minute and venomous particles like dust that, when Dilsey opened the door of the cabin and emerged, needled laterally into her flesh, precipitating not so much a moisture as a substance partaking of the quality of thin, not quite congealed oil.

As was mentioned above, this discussion really leads into the larger one of the extent to which culture is now defined by the scientific and the technological, and less by the literary and artistic. Faulkner, among many others, was concerned that literature had to maintain its significance in the face of advancing science, and believed that the way to do this was not to ignore something like wave-particle duality but to acknowledge it as a useful means of witnessing and communicating natural phenomena in literature. For Dante, half a millennium earlier, the issue of whether science or literature was more pervasive needed no resolution -- the "science" and the "literature" of light were indistinguishable. By the time Shakespeare wrote, science had begun to separate itself from religion and philosophy, yet Shakespeare could ignore so fundamental a discovery as the heliocentric universe and still maintain the integrity of his dramatic vision -- a vision that in fact depended upon ignoring it. Later, a poet such as Donne would integrate the optics of Kepler into a poem that delighted in the intersection between the scientific and the spiritual. The widening gulf between these two dimensions in the 18th century engaged them in a debate, however, that would bind them in a complex relationship characterized not only by dissent (as in the case of Keats and Campbell vs. Newton and Thomson) but by two-way inducement (Whitman by Fresnel, and modern physics by a literary tradition connecting light with time and space). Prior to any of this was a Western tradition that maintained light and literature together as different versions of the same activity, the revelation of truth.

SUGGESTED READING

Beer, Gillian. Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983.

Bono, James J. The Word of God and the Languages of Man: Interpreting Nature in Early Modern Science and Medicine. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995.

Cosslett, Tess. The Scientific Movement and Victorian Literature. New York: Harvester Press, 1982.

Demastes, William W. Theatre of Chaos: Beyond Absurdism into Orderly Disorder. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Henderson, Linda Dalrymple. The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983.

Isaacs, Leonard. Darwin to Double Helix. London: Butterworths, 1977.

Jordanova, L.J., ed. Languages of Nature: Critical Essays on Science and Literature. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1986.

Livingston, Paisley. Literature and Rationality: Ideas of Agency in Theory and Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Morton, Peter. The Vital Science: Biology and the Literary Imagination, 1860-1900. London: Allen & Unwin, 1984.

Rivers, James Clark Seabrook. Astronomy and physics in British and American poetry, 1920-1960. Columbia, S.C.: s.n., 1967.

Slade, Joseph W. and Judith Yaross Lee, eds. Beyond the Two Cultures: Essays on Science, Technology, and Literature. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1990.