Introduction

Abstract

In a notebook kept around the time that he worked on his safety lamp (circa 1815), the invention that would be praised for the countless lives it saved in British mines, Humphry Davy writes the following:

Those brilliant and poetical works in which enthusiasm takes place of reason, and in which the human intellect exhausts itself, as it were, in imagination and feeling, resemble monstrous flowers, brilliant and odorous, but affording no materials of re-production

(Collected Works, I, 212)¹

He is writing of a particular kind of poetry here perhaps, rather than poetry in general, but there is further evidence in the notebooks for Davy’s coming to distinguish between poetry and science in these ways.² For example, comparing Shakespeare to Bacon and Milton to Newton around 1805, Davy writes: ‘The object of poetry, whatever may be said by poets, is more to amuse than to instruct; the object of science more to instruct than amuse’ (Collected Works, I, 147). It is important to keep in mind the fact that, notwithstanding such views, Davy himself wrote poetry throughout his life, but it does seem that he valued chemistry more highly for these reasons.