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The anti-scientific bias of the first generation of Romantic poets is well-known, and Wordsworth is no exception. His famous “we murder to dissect” advocates a direct apprehension of Nature that runs against scientific methods. His portrait of an infant prodigy in the fourth book of The Prelude even reads as a satire of the scientific approach of nature, the proper attitude being described, a few dozen lines further, through the character of the Winander Boy. Yet this rejection should be qualified inasmuch as the communion with Nature so often depicted is not exclusive of a questioning of her. On looking closer, one might even think that the poet is something of the scientist's counterpart, he who “[carries] sensation into the midst of the object of the Science itself.”

Coleridge's early poetical ambitions owed much to contemporary speculations in natural philosophy and metaphysics. Hartley's vibratiuncles, Priestley's dynamic monism and Erasmus Darwin's pantheistic poetry all seemed to converge into a central vision of organising “myriads” providentially at work within the universe. Yet Coleridge soon distanced himself from “materialistic” science, for both philosophical and poetical reasons: he saw the will to see—and to image forth—the primary causes of things as a species of idolatry, leading to poetry of an artificial kind. His subsequent dismissal of “allegorical machinery” was an important moment in the “divorce” between science and poetry that would later be associated with Romanticism.

Prometheus Unbound brings to light the affinities which unite physics and poetics. During Act II, the awakening of the latent energies in matter and in the mind is conveyed by the motif of the sound wave. Its periodic movement embraces the regular return of rhymes and rhythms in the poem. Sound waves spread and reverberate throughout Asia's song: they stand for the way poetic language breaks up the boundaries between the Self and the Other. This leads, in Act IV, to the celebration of the cosmos as a web of mutual attractions. Measure, a concept shared by prosody and mathematics, then becomes the leading metaphor for the affinity between science and poetry. Mathematical physics allows the discovery of the harmonious rhythms that govern the trajectories of celestial bodies. It contributes to the poet's meditation on the ability of poetry to give form to matter and highlight its hidden harmonies. Astronomy, which associates the accuracy of mathematics with the boundlessness of the universe, stands for the desire to encompass the infinite within the measured frame of the poem.

This article deals with the perceptions of the mind and body in Keats's art and reflects on the role of medicine at that time, including the rise of surgery (1800-30). Keats, the apothecary-surgeon, is indeed the author of an anatomy of poetry, choosing to dissect his characters while preserving their spirits. He is inspired by a medicine of “conservation” treatments, integrated in a larger narrative of aesthetic reconstructions and scenes of passion born out of an art of skulls and corpses. As he explores the living, the poet-physician develops another vision of scientific “disinterestedness” where the verse of the anatomist opens up to the grotesqueness of humanity. The wounds and broken souls are of interest only for the beauty of their reconstruction and the world of science is thus reshaped by the poet's Romantic sensibility. In the end, Keats's fascination for man's inner mechanisms (arterial pulses, blood vessels, veins, fluids) makes for a new kind of poetry.

Throughout his life, Lord Alfred Tennyson showed great interest for science, which can be traced in two major poems: In Memoriam and The Princess. Far from providing the speaker of In Memoriam with lasting comfort, scientific discourse proves ambivalent enough to echo his mourning voice, thus contributing to the melancholy flow. In The Princess the playful narrative voice mocks the evolutionist stance of the main feminine character and shows its limits and inner contradictions. In both poems, the image of a monstrous mother nature goes together with the recurring figure of a lost child. The “infant” may be a metaphor for Tennyson's whole poetical work, but it also discloses some secret place behind the words where another poetical voice endeavours to make itself heard.

The object of this paper is to plead in favour of rereading Matthew Arnold with a candid eye, at a time when literary studies reconsider historical and contextual approaches. A brief survey of the reception of Matthew Arnold's critical work and of his influence on twentieth-century criticism will make for some assessment of his place in the history of ideas. Poet and critic, Matthew Arnold never claimed to be a scientist or a philosopher, and it may be argued that it was his strategy to maintain some degree of looseness in the definition of his concepts, as his idea of critical discourse was half-way between the scientific and the literary.

From the Renaissance to the Romantic age, the androgyne was considered as the paradigmatic model of an asexual transcendence. But the founding Ovidian myth of Hermaphroditus is a story of loss of masculine power (“mollescat”). This fear of effeminacy resurfaced in the Victorian era. The medico-legal studies of the period aimed at classifying and controlling what when then perceived as deviant bodies and sexualities. The Victorian poet A.C. Swinburne, on the contrary, tried to resist this attempt at defining indeterminate beings, by praising barren sexual ambiguity as an aesthetic principle. Therefore, in his two poems “Hermaphroditus” and “Fragoletta” dealing with “fleshly” hermaphrodites in Poems and Ballads, First Series (1866), Swinburne replaces the Ovidian metamorphosis (“turn into”) with a hymn to sexual deviance (“turn”) which can be interpreted both as a per-version of the normative gender codifications of the age and as a sub-version of the previous romantic readings of the myth of the hermaphrodite, from Shelley to Gautier.

Saltationism—literally, the way in which nature is considered able to take sudden evolutionary leaps and is therefore not limited to gradualism or long-term evolution—is part of the warp and weft of Hopkins's poetry, esthetics and philosophical outlook. His poetry and approach to language, be it poetic or scientific, as well as to the natural world and man's place in it, all bear witness to saltationism, first fixed by the poet as a philosophical principle when he was a student at Oxford, and probably confirmed by his reading of the Catholic evolutionist St. George Jackson Mivart. Though Hopkins's sympathy with Mivart has been noted by some critics, albeit a very few, such criticism has tended to focus less on the poems than on Hopkins's sympathy with Mivart as a way for the poet to position himself in relation to the wider, indeed, dominant scientific debate on Darwinism in the nineteenth century. Mivart's Genesis of Species (1871) may have aroused such sympathy in Hopkins because it chimed so closely with the poet's aesthetic and poetic. Hopkins's ability to pass back and forth so easily between poetry and science—his four letters to Nature were almost the only things he published in his lifetime—provides further confirmation in act of his saltationism. The article offers examples showing how the saltationist viewpoint works out in poetic practice, before concluding with several other points relating to Hopkins's interest in science.