Listen to part of a lecture in a Literature class.(male professor) OK, today we’re gonna talk about an important influence on eighteenth century British poets, the influence of discoveries made in the sciences. Surprising, isn’t it?Science and art may not seem compatible. As one late eighteenth century poet William Blake said, “Art is the tree of life. Science is the tree of death.”(male student) Well, that makes sense. Artists and scientists understand the world differently, don’t they?(professor) In some ways, that’s true. Poets want to convey the mystery of nature, while scientists seem to want to take the mystery out of nature, to unravel its mysteries through experimentation.Nevertheless, they both try to explain the world and nature.And I think they’re also both moved by the sense of wonder that nature inspires.But for much of the eighteenth century, one scientist and his discoveries really got the attention of poets and that was Isaac Newton, one of the foremost thinkers of his time.Newton, as you know, was a mathematician and physicist, a major figure in the scientific revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Among his accomplishments were his three laws of motion.They resulted in the formulation of the universal law of gravitation and he developed calculus.And he was very important to the European intellectual movement of the eighteenth century called the enlightenment.The intellectuals of this period promoted the use of reason to further our knowledge of the universe.Um, anyway, in 1704, Newton published a book on the properties of light called Opticks.In this book, he published the findings of his experiments with light and prisms.He had discovered that light could be refracted or broken up into the colors of the spectrum.This knowledge that light is the source of color in the world gave light added significance and it did not go unnoticed by poets.In fact, Newton’s discovery about light was so often written about that many of these poets were referred to as Newtonian or scientific poets.(female student) Hadn’t poets written about light before?(professor) Yes, they certainly had. Light has always had an enormous symbolic power.But before Newton, when light was used symbolically in European poetry, it was often part of the duality: light in opposition to darkness.But Newton’s discovery that light was the source of color, well, that’s a more complex image and it really captured the imaginations of poets of the eighteenth century.Poets described the same phenomenon that Newton described in Opticks, but through the imagery of natural world, sunrises and sunsets, for instance, and the colors of gemstones, and, of course, rainbows.(female student) Well, maybe poets understood Newton’s theories, but what about other people?His books were written in Latin, weren’t they?(professor) In general, yes. But Opticks was written in English and in an accessible manner, a style that was relatively, um, nontechnical. Also a great number of popular science books were being published in England at the time that sought to explain many of Newton’s theories.So the general public was better informed than you might think.(female student) So it seems as if not all poets felt the same way Blake did about science and art.(professor) No, they were caught up in the enlightenment.But at the end of the eighteenth century, there was a backlash against the enlightenment, the Romantic Movement.Like William Blake, many artists and intellectuals emphasized the role of emotions in life and downplayed the importance of reason.They believed science could not explain the mysteries of life and the natural world.