原文已被隐藏，你可用 快捷键 - 或点击 显示原文 按钮来查看原文
第1段
1 .Listen to part of a lecture in a Literature class.
该句暂无译文！
2 .(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?
该句暂无译文！
3 . 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.”
该句暂无译文！
4 . (male student) Well, that makes sense. Artists and scientists understand the world differently, don’t they?
该句暂无译文！
5 .(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.
该句暂无译文！
6 .Nevertheless, they both try to explain the world and nature.
该句暂无译文！
7 .And I think they’re also both moved by the sense of wonder that nature inspires.
该句暂无译文！
8 . 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.
该句暂无译文！
9 . 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.
该句暂无译文！
10 .They resulted in the formulation of the universal law of gravitation and he developed calculus.
该句暂无译文！
11 . And he was very important to the European intellectual movement of the eighteenth century called the enlightenment.
该句暂无译文！
12 .The intellectuals of this period promoted the use of reason to further our knowledge of the universe.
该句暂无译文！
13 .Um, anyway, in 1704, Newton published a book on the properties of light called Opticks.
该句暂无译文！
14 . In this book, he published the findings of his experiments with light and prisms.
该句暂无译文！
15 .He had discovered that light could be refracted or broken up into the colors of the spectrum.
该句暂无译文！
16 . This knowledge that light is the source of color in the world gave light added significance and it did not go unnoticed by poets.
该句暂无译文！
17 .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.
该句暂无译文！
18 . (female student) Hadn’t poets written about light before?
该句暂无译文！
19 . (professor) Yes, they certainly had. Light has always had an enormous symbolic power.
该句暂无译文！
20 . But before Newton, when light was used symbolically in European poetry, it was often part of the duality: light in opposition to darkness.
该句暂无译文！
21 .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.
该句暂无译文！
22 .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.
该句暂无译文！
23 . (female student) Well, maybe poets understood Newton’s theories, but what about other people?
该句暂无译文！
24 .His books were written in Latin, weren’t they?
该句暂无译文！
25 .(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.
该句暂无译文！
26 .So the general public was better informed than you might think.
该句暂无译文！
27 . (female student) So it seems as if not all poets felt the same way Blake did about science and art.
该句暂无译文！
28 .(professor) No, they were caught up in the enlightenment.
该句暂无译文！
29 .But at the end of the eighteenth century, there was a backlash against the enlightenment, the Romantic Movement.
该句暂无译文！
30 .Like William Blake, many artists and intellectuals emphasized the role of emotions in life and downplayed the importance of reason.
该句暂无译文！
31 .They believed science could not explain the mysteries of life and the natural world.
该句暂无译文！