Today we do not expect poems to carry scientifically valid information. But it was not always so. This book returns to the beginnings of the division of labor between literature and science to recover a tradition of Romantic life writing for which poetry was a privileged technique of empirical inquiry, especially when it came to the intersection between biological and historical life. It puts apparently literary projects such as William Blake’s poetry of embryogenesis, Goethe’s journals On Morphology, and Percy Shelley’s “poetry of life” back into conversation with openly poetic life sciences ... More

Today we do not expect poems to carry scientifically valid information. But it was not always so. This book returns to the beginnings of the division of labor between literature and science to recover a tradition of Romantic life writing for which poetry was a privileged technique of empirical inquiry, especially when it came to the intersection between biological and historical life. It puts apparently literary projects such as William Blake’s poetry of embryogenesis, Goethe’s journals On Morphology, and Percy Shelley’s “poetry of life” back into conversation with openly poetic life sciences of Erasmus Darwin, Johann Gottfried Herder, and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Revealing a hidden counterpoint of atomist materialism in a period best known for vitalism and organic form, the book argues that many Romantic poetic sciences share in reviving Lucretius’s De rerum natura to advance a view of biological life as neither self-organizing nor autonomous, but rather dependent on the collaborative and semiotic processes that give it viable and recognizable shape. They summon Lucretian materialism not only to present a logic of life resistant to the vitalist stress on self-authorizing power but also to make a monumental and gorgeous case for the role of poetic figuration in the perception and communication of empirical realities. The first dedicated study of this mortal and materialist dimension of Romantic biopoetics, Sweet Science advances a new theory of Romantic figuration and opens a through-line between Enlightenment materialisms of nature and Marx’s coming historical materialism.