3 - “Wondrous Facts”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 January 2022
Summary
John Arthos merely mentions Henry Brooke's Universal Beauty(1778) as illustrating how, throughout the entire Georgic tradition, “the description of nature is chiefly governed by didactic purposes.” “Ambitious and rhapsodical to the point of becoming often incoherent,” as well as “tedious,” Brooke's poem has some merit for William Powell Jones because of “the numerous scientific examples used.” Marjorie Hope Nicolson offers a lengthy overview of the same text, establishing its initial publication “in parts from 1734 to 1736” or roughly at the midpoint of Thomson's work on his much revised Seasons:
Brooke was perhaps the most “scientific” poet of the generation. Who now reads Universal Beauty, except in extracts, chosen apparently with a desire on the part of editors to avoid all that made Brooke's poem popular in its generation? Brooke declared that he had set himself a “daring unexampl’d task”; certainly no other poet of the period ventured to crowd into his lines so many complexities, in comparison with which Newton's own technicalities in the Principia or the Opticks are as clear as the light whose nature he analyzed. Yet Brooke's treatment of the new scientific theories was an able encyclopedia in verse; his notes are often illuminating, and usually more intelligible than his compressed text. And in spite of his technicalities and abstrusities, there is no question that Henry Brooke felt profoundly, and transmitted to his generation his belief that the discoveries of science proved what certain philosophers had only surmised— that there is universal beauty in the works of God.
Elsewhere, Nicolson implies that she regards Brooke as a lesser Thomson. Whereas “Brooke […] for all his scientific terminology and even more scientific footnotes had his occasional poetic moments,” no such caveat applies to her claim that “Thomson was as scientific in his description of mountains as any poet except Henry Brooke.” But the two poets diverged in a number of ways, not least through Brooke's profoundly disingenuous response to the scientists of his time, whom he conspicuously did not salute as (fellow) aristoi, even as he drew on their work.
Sharing the vision that Arthos denies Thomson— of “the universe” as “a vast distilling apparatus, or limbec” — Brooke's Universal Beauty describes many of the same phenomena in much the same language: explaining the workings of “the alternate heart,” he observes of circulating blood that “Its wanton floods the tubal system lave”;
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- Four Augustan Science Poets: Abraham Cowley, James Thomson, Henry Brooke, Erasmus Darwin , pp. 47 - 64Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2020