SOURCE: "Decomposing Newton's Rainbow," in Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. XLV, No. 1, January-March 1984, pp. 115-40.

In the following essay, Epstein and Greenburg examine how the image of the rainbow was affected by Newton's Opticks. The critics focus particularly on how the literary representation of the rainbow changed and developed during and after Newton's life.

Sir Isaac Newton has intrigued philosophers, poets, artists, and critics alike as the scientist "with his prism and silent face," a "mind forever voyaging through strange seas of thought alone."¹ The deified figure of Newton, images and metaphors drawn from Newtonian science, and poetic versions of Newtonian cosmology all appear repeatedly in the poetry written after Newton's death, and these phenomena have been extensively studied.² Such studies as identify Newton's presence in eighteenth-century literature generally interpret particular poems or movements in poetry insofar as Newton's imagery or cosmology affected them. Most literary...