The Discrimination of Science and Poetry in Humphry Davy’s Nitrous Oxide Researches

Humphry Davy’s Researches, Chemical and Philosophical; Chiefly Concerning Nitrous Oxide (1800) included descriptions of its inhalation by writers such as Coleridge. Nevertheless, Davy discriminated between scientific and literary discourse and used the key term ‘imagination’ in a sceptical sense defined by controlled trial in medicine. This essay examines the language of Davy’s text on each side of the divide between scientific explanation and subjective experience. His chemical nomenclature is contrasted to the Lyrical Ballads programme for poetic diction. Such specialisation argues against the impression that scientific and poetic intellects were unified at the time, because either not yet differentiated or else fused in a special Romantic crucible.