SOURCE: "Scientific and Poetic Imagination in James Thomson's Poem Sacred to the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton," in Philological Quarterly, Vol. 61, No. 1, Winter, 1982, pp. 33-50.

In the following essay, Ketcham investigates three patterns in Poem Sacred to the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton through which Thomson "takes the elegy for Newton as an occasion to define the scientific imagination poetically, and, through the definition of science, to define implicitly the potentials of the poetic imagination."

The lines of influence between the poetry and the new science of the eighteenth century have been often studied, usually with the aim of showing how the observations, language, or methods of science are incorporated into poems. My interest here, though, in reading James Thomson's Poem Sacred to the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton, is not so much in what science does to poetry as in what poetry does to science, since Thomson...