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Article: Coleridge, Shelley, Davy, and science's millennium. (Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Humphry Davy)
- Article from:
- Criticism
- Article date:
- June 22, 1998
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1998 Wayne State University Press. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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"True knowledge leads to love." --Percy Shelley
One is struck, whenever one rereads the notes to Shelley's Queen Mab, by the sheer brazenness of their confidence, of their palpable expectation of a new world just here, a world conjured up ideally by new knowledge in physics, astronomy, economics, as well as philosophy, ethics, theology. It is hard not to think of Coleridge's excitement, in his own youth, at the world-remaking newness of the chemistry of Davy and Priestley, the botany of Darwin. Indeed, the model for Queen Mab's visionary science as well as for Coleridge's millennial optimism in his 1794 Religious Musings was Erasmus Darwin's enormously popular ...