The dissertation undertakes a loosely chronological examination of Goethe's chief prose and poetic works in four areas of scientific inquiry: geology, botany, anatomy, and meteorology. Through a comparison of the prose essays and thematically related poems, it portrays the evolving relationship between prose and poetry in his scientific writings, explores the nature and scope of his programmatic reflections in regard to scientific language, and discloses underlying motivations which he veiled in his scientific prose. It is found that the union of science and poetry "auf hoherer Stelle" which Goethe envisioned applies not only to his explicitly didactic poetry, but has a germinal presence in the form of a poetic subtext within the related prose treatises. More broadly, the unified statement made by his prose and poetic science lifts it into the context of his entire literary production--a point underscored by his setting of scientific studies in their autobiographical context. This in turn is found to participate in a larger program of raising personal experience to archetypal status and viewing the particular as symbolic of the general. Goethe's demand that the language used to describe each domain be derived from that domain, is found to have implications beyond the striving to create appropriate terminology. The same impulse is reflected in scientific writings which create a formal mimesis of the natural phenomenon under study, or which more broadly reflect, by their tone and imagery, the character he experienced in that realm of nature. Finally, Goethe's freedom in dealing with scientific terminology is found to represent a form of linguistic irony, reflecting his perception that all language is "eigentlich bildlich" and cannot refer directly to reality. His recourse to poetry within science thus represents an epistemological statement.

The idea of progress found in the poetry of Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Shelley germinated in the intersection of Enlightenment philosophy and the millennial tradition. In this dissertation, I show that the spirit of scientific inquiry and the tradition of millennial prophecy come together in Romantic poetry to form a secular conception of human destiny and spiritual restoration. Mingling the spirit of anticipation and hope associated with the millennial tradition and the spirit of empirical observation found in Enlightenment philosophy, the Romantic poets reinterpret divine providence as moral and intellectual progress. In their reinterpretation of human progress, the Romantics transfer initiative from an intervening deity to the human mind itself. In Romanticism, the notion of a guiding presence in human history is replaced by a secular idea of providence based upon faith in human nature's essential goodness and potential. Examining the influence of Enlightenment philosophy on Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Shelley, I show that the new Romantic myth of redemption was reinforced by empirical theories that promised to renovate society and the species through the rational observation of human behavior. In a reinterpretation of spiritual restoration and the millennial plot, the Romantic poets identify themselves as chosen prophets and internalize the saving and sanctifying power traditionally attributed to a divine redeemer. Combining Enlightenment philosophy's interest in cognitive processes with the millennial tradition's spirit of renewal and redemption, the Romantic poets introduce imagination as a visionary faculty capable of bringing a new world into creation. This dissertation focuses on the new myths of redemption forged by four Romantic poets. Close readings of Blake's Jerusalem, Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," Wordsworth's The Prelude, and Shelley's Prometheus Unbound demonstrate how the Romantics adapt the millennial prospect and plot to a human and earth-centered theory of progress.

Choi, Pak Cheong. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 111-115). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Abstract --- p.ii / Chapter Chapter One: --- Introduction: Late Qing Science Fantasy and the Import of Science and Technology --- p.1 / Chapter Chapter Two: --- When Time Becomes Abstract: A Chinese Time Travel Story --- p.25 / Chapter Chapter Three: --- "Body in the Scientific Context: Physiology, Invisibility and Being in Motion" --- p.45 / Chapter Chapter Four: --- From Survival to Technotopia: Living and Evolving with Artefacts --- p.73 / Chapter Chapter Five: --- Conclusion --- p.108 / References

This study examines the themes of alchemy and transformation in Paradise Lost and seventeenth-century thought. Beginning with an overvieiw of the historical roots of alchemy, this study analyzes the ancient, underlying philosophical concepts that marital union produces the birth of the soul and that destruction is necessary for this birth. Alchemical references identified in Paradise Lost include animal lore and direct alchemical images, which demonstrate Milton's knowledge of alchemy and his deliberate use of the alchemical metaphor. These themes support the proposal that Milton, a Christian humanist, uses alchemy as a metaphor described in this study as "divine alchemy," which begins with his belief that Christians, inheriting original sin, must submit themselves to a transformative process similar to transmutation to restore right reason and, ultimately, achieve salvation. / by Andrea J. Rutherford. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 201?. / Includes bibliography. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / System requirements: Adobe Reader.

The aim of this thesis is to arrive at a characterisation of twentieth century poetry and science by means of a detailed study of the work of four poets who engaged extensively with science and whose writing lives spanned the greater part of the period. The study of science in the work of the four chosen poets, Hugh MacDiarmid (1892 – 1978), Judith Wright (1915 – 2000), Edwin Morgan (1920 – 2010), and Miroslav Holub (1923 – 1998), is preceded by a literature survey and an initial theoretical chapter. This initial part of the thesis outlines the interdisciplinary history of the academic subject of poetry and science, addressing, amongst other things, the challenges presented by the episodes known as the ‘two cultures' and the ‘science wars'. Seeking to offer a perspective on poetry and science more aligned to scientific materialism than is typical in the interdiscipline, a systemic challenge to Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) is put forward in the first chapter. Additionally, the founding work of poetry and science, I. A. Richards's Science and Poetry (1926), is assessed both in the context in which it was written, and from a contemporary viewpoint; and, as one way to understand science in poetry, a theory of the creative misreading of science is developed, loosely based on Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence (1973). The detailed study of science in poetry commences in Chapter II with Hugh MacDiarmid's late work in English, dating from his period on the Shetland Island of Whalsay (1933 – 1941). The thesis in this chapter is that this work can be seen as a radical integration of poetry and science; this concept is considered in a variety of ways including through a computational model, originally suggested by Robert Crawford. The Australian poet Judith Wright, the subject of Chapter III, is less well known to poetry and science, but a detailed engagement with physics can be identified, including her use of four-dimensional imagery, which has considerable support from background evidence. Biology in her poetry is also studied in the light of recent work by John Holmes. In Chapter IV, science in the poetry of Edwin Morgan is discussed in terms of its origin and development, from the perspective of the mythologised science in his science fiction poetry, and from the ‘hard' technological perspective of his computer poems. Morgan's work is cast in relief by readings which are against the grain of some but not all of his published comments. The thesis rounds on its theme of materialism with the fifth and final chapter which studies the work of Miroslav Holub, a poet and practising scientist in communist-era Prague. Holub's work, it is argued, represents a rare and important literary expression of scientific materialism. The focus on materialism in the thesis is not mechanistic, nor exclusive of the domain of the imagination; instead it frames the contrast between the original science and the transformed poetic version. The thesis is drawn together in a short conclusion.