General - Science and Poetry

Erchinger - poetry and science and meaning

2018 “modes of meaning-making that take place alongside each other”

Richardson - status of brain, brain and ideology

2009 - “iconoclastic … in the ideological ferment of the time”

De Almeida - era and truth

1991 - “The era’s commitment to the specifics of empirical, existential truth”

WHat is a prescient area in which there is contact between romantic poetics and contemporary neurological advances

In the role given to sensation

Astley Cooper treatsed sensation as an active and transformative process on the materiality of the brain, not a passive, automated registration of the external world.

Why were neurological materialists like William Lawrence hounded?

promoted the idea of the brain as a material, opposing notions of a quasi-divine soul - this pov linked to libertine poets and political agitators esp in aftermath of french revolution.

Who were JG Spurzheim, Soemmerring, Vicq D’Azir, Bell and Magendie and what did they do?

JG Spurzheim - popular neuroanatomy dissections, pioneering brain dissection tecniques he and Gall perfected in 1780s and 90s

Soemmerring traced the cranial nerves in 1778

Vicq D’Azir described cerebral convolutions in 1786

Bell (England) and Magendie (France) discovered the distinction between sensory and motor nerves. This was first described in print by Bell in a privately printed work in 1811.

What were Hartley’s ideas around blood and the distinction between conscious and unconscious thought processes

He aligned with Bell’s idea of the face’s innervated vascular system - displays the mind’s passions before the blood reached the heart. particular concern w blushing!

Hartley attempted to explode post-Cartesian dualism, regrounding philosophy of the mind in the brain and nervous system. Reduced mental processing to a single associative process. Argues for material embodiment of the mind in the brain and the salience of unconscious mental functioning.

WHat was a growing trend of romantic medicien

ideas around medical ethics

Darwin, Gall, Cabanis, Bell all suggested that humans were by nature social creatures with tendencies towards bonding, imitation, empathy.

concerns on the impact of human beings on eachother.

What was William Babington’s lecture on chemistry about, which Keats likely attended while at Guys?

the relative philsophical merits of the artist and scientist - contemp concern

“The Artist is selfish, for he is constantly labouring for his own interest; he works from imitation and without principle … The phylosopher or man of science is in search of truth in order to make a general application of it for the benefit of his fellow creatures”

Give a quote from William Hazlitt’s lecture ‘On Poetry in General’, delivered Jan 1818

“The Progress of knowledge and refinement has a tendency to circumscribe the limits of the imagination, and to clip the wings of poetry”

What thread of Keats scientific beliefs does this comment by Hazlitt link to?

Anti-Newtonianism

Haydon recollecting dinner in Dec 1817 where he suggests Keats and Lamb agreed that Newton “destroyed al the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to the prismatic colours”