SOURCE: “Science and the Poets,” in Cosmopolitan, Vol. 5, No. 2, April, 1888, pp. 127-30.

In the following essay, Burroughs looks at nineteenth-century literary figures, including Keats, Tennyson, Emerson, and Carlyle, to assess the extent to which these writers were influenced by science.

It is interesting to note to what extent the leading literary men of our country and time have been influenced by science, or have availed themselves of its results. A great many of them not at all, it would seem. Among our own writers Bryant, Irving, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Whittier, show little or no trace of the influence of science. The later English poets, Arnold, Swinburne, Rossetti, do not appear to have profited by science. There is no science in Rossetti, unless it be a kind of dark, forbidden science, or science in league with sorcery. Rossetti's muse seems to have been drugged with an opiate that worked inversely...