Abstract
IN one of his essays, Macaulay, with his usual leaning to antithesis, holds that “as civilisation advances, poetry almost necessarily declines.” His opinion was that science and poetry are antagonistic. The late Poet Laureate, however, showed that scientific facts and phenomena could be clothed in language at once poetical and impressive. Miss Constance Naden, who died at the end of 1889, won for herself a high place among poets of science and philosophy, and her admirers include many distinguished votaries of these branches of knowledge. Astronomy, geology, evolutionary ethics, and the nebular theory are a few of the subjects which inspired her to write, and that in a manner which commands admiration. She was a devoted disciple of Mr. Herbert Spencer, and, indeed, was a witness to the truth of his words: "It is not true that the cultivation of science is necessarily unfriendly to the exercise of imagination and the love of the beautiful. On the contrary, science opens up realms of poetry where, to the-unscientific, all is a blank.”
The Complete Poetical Works of Constance Naden.
(London: Bickers and Son, 1894)
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[Book Reviews]. Nature 50, 594 (1894). https://doi.org/10.1038/050594c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/050594c0