Sweet Science

Today we do not expect poems to carry scientifically valid information. But it was not always so. In Sweet Science , Amanda Jo Goldstein 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. Goldstein puts apparently literary projects, such as William Blake’s poetry of embryogenesis, Goethe’s journals On Morphology , and Percy Shelley’s “poetry of life,” b