ABSTRACT
In 1884 the poet George Barlow published his Poems Real and Ideal. One of these poems, 'Poetry and Science', directly addresses the binary distinction, identifying scientific knowledge with the 'real' and poetic imagination with the 'ideal'. This chapter discusses the various ways in which science and poetry intersected in the nineteenth century, focusing on the supposed epistemological opposition between poetic subjectivity and scientific objectivity; the quotation and the composition of poetry by scientific researchers; and the influence of science on the language and the generic conventions of nineteenth-century verse. Poetry made a contribution to nineteenth-century definitions of science, through the medium of poetic quotation. The growing cultural influence of science, and of scientific practices, fundamentally altered the conventions of more than one poetic genre. Naden's satirical and poetically self-conscious deployment of technical terminology represents just one of the ways in which such terminology was incorporated into verse, and more research is needed on how scientific language contributed to poetic writing.
