Yesterday I returned home from a trip to Ohio. We began in Oberlin and then moved on to Gambier, home of the Kenyon Review and Tyler Meier, who is in the habit of giving away books. All the way home I read Richard Hamblyn‘s The Invention of Clouds, which braids science and literature together in a manner I find irresistible. (Hamblyn has also edited an edition of Daniel Defoe’s The Storm, definitely coming up soon on my reading list.)
The Invention of Clouds tells the story of Luke Howard, the man who first gave us the cloud names of cirrus, cumulus, stratus and nimbus. Born in 1772, he spent much of his young life observing the sky. Following the taxonomy craze of his age, in 1802 he delivered a lecture in which he explained his Linnaean cloud classifications. Immediately recognized as an invaluable contribution to the nascent field of meteorology, Howard’s terms went on to attract the attention of Goethe, who wrote a poem in praise of his work.
For me, it is in this intersection of meteorology and literature that Hamblyn’s book becomes interesting. A few months ago, I wrote about the relationship between science and poetry in terms of color. I was excited, in upstate New York, to discover Hamblyn writing about the Romantics’ distaste for Newton’s prism. He quotes the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon’s journal entry following a boisterous discussion of his painting, The Entry of Christ into Jerusalem, (which features likenesses of William Wordsworth, Isaac Newton and Voltaire) at a dinner party attended by Wordsworth, John Keats and Charles Lamb, among others:
Lamb soon gets tipsey, and tipsey he got very shortly, to our infinite amusement. He then attacked me for putting in Newton, ‘a Fellow who believed nothing unless it was as clear as the three sides of a triangle.’ And then he and Keats agreed he had destroyed all the Poetry of the rainbow, by reducing it to a prism.
This anti-scientific outlook was not all-pervasive, however; Haydon also describes Samuel Coleridge’s attendance at “Royal Institution lectures in order, as he put it, ‘to renew my stock of metaphors.'” (I had to think also, via Spicer, of Yeats and his spooks.)
And Haydon goes on to reference a number of early nineteenth century poems that deal with clouds in ways that seem to satisfy both the Romantic and the cold philosopher. Included are excerpts from Percy Shelley’s “The Cloud,” and “Mutability,” as well as Goethe’s “Howards Ehrenged??chtnis” in its entirety. (I cannot truly recommend it. Goethe, I think, is better on color than clouds.)
I feel like I can’t wiggle out of this post without mentioning “I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud,” so I’m not going to.