ABSTRACT
For an enthusiastic proponent of experimental philosophy like Jane Barker, the New Science’s view of inquiry and knowledge, its results, its processes, and sometimes its technical language offered a mode for investigating and conceptualizing human emotion. That was hardly true for everyone at the end of the seventeenth century. Poetic form also allows Barker to include theological perspectives in the theory of emotion and nature, thus bringing together two forces rapidly parting ways, experimental philosophy and religious faith. In “A Farewell to Poetry,” Barker fuses natural philosophy and verse to forge an understanding of nature that incorporates the body, the heart, and the soul, and human knowledge and God’s cosmos. Natural philosophy appears in just about every genre available in the seventeenth century and catalyzed the development of others. The insights offered by the fusion of natural philosophy and poetry offer the clarification that neither system could provide alone.
