Review of Tim Fulford’s “Mont Blanc Imagined: Poetry, Science and the Prospect-View in Davy and Coleridge.”

In this article Tim Fulford offers a detailed and basically chronological account of Humphry Davy's poetic and scientific oeuvre in relation to the early-Romantic vogue for the "prospect view".It is argued that Davy's poetic productions were deeply indebted both to Coleridge and to the aesthetic implications of Erasmus Darwin's writings, with their emphasis upon peripatetic imagination.It is suggested that Davy's approach to poetic composition involved "the rapid mental organisation of multiple inter-related elements [] just as chemical experiment did" ( 16).Indeed, it is proposed that Davy's science was in many ways indebted to his practice as a poet.The paper offers an account of Davy's close relationship with Coleridge, as illustrated by his Irish prospect-poem, "Fairhead", which stresses the cliff's endurance of the elements, a phenomenon which invokes the Romantic concept of the Sublime.Parallels are drawn here with Coleridge's Chamouni poem, "Hymn Before Sunrise", which explores the ways in which Mont Blanc "is not perceived by being imprinted on a passive mind, but by the mind's motion" (17).It is argued that Davy's scientific work was underpinned, as in his lectures in the early 1800s, by the strength and originality of individual acts of perception.In this way the mountain scenery "becomes an emblem of the imaginative combination of images and ideas into a single structure" (20).It is argued that Davy's notebooks "reveal the 'rapid combinations' of verse composition and chemical experimentalism" (22).For Davy, Fulford concludes, as for the other Romantics, "transcendence is produced in the material world by our mental activity" (20).Fulford here provides an insightful and apposite reading of the creative interaction between poetry and science in Humphry Davy's life and career, one which valuably supplements earlier studies by Maurice Hindle, Richard Holmes, Roger Sharrock, Anne Treneer, Sharon Ruston and others.Fulford usefully stresses the influence on Davy's poetry of Coleridge, Wordsworth and Southey, but also shows that Davy's imagination had already been inspired by his early life in Cornwall.The paper neatly illustrates how the newly Romantic concept of the Sublime was triggered by the stones of Nature which would lead, in Davy's case, to the discovery of the power of electrical discharge which enabled his later chemical discoveries at the Royal Institution.Davy indeed would classify chemistry as "a branch of sublime philosophy", noting how, in his view, mankind is "lost in obscure, though sublime imaginations concerning unknown agencies" (Collected Works, vol.II, London: Cornhill, 1839 edition, 320).Fulford indicates very clearly how neatly Davy's life and career coincided with the onset of Romanticism, in his role as a "natural philosopher".This analysis is highly effective in demonstrating the ways in which, in Wordsworth's words, the sublime imagination seeks "to search the mystic cause of things/ And follow nature in her sacred springs", and the article pertinaciously elaborates the ways in which Davy's works linked to the mysteries of the vital forces beneath the world's surface.Fulford shows how Davy's theoretical and experimental work, notably his corpuscular theory of light and heat, his nitrous oxide experiments, isolation of potassium, and his invention of the miner's safety-lamp, fed into his poetic output.The essay is well focused upon Davy's interaction with not only Coleridge but also