Orphic Voice

Elizabeth Sewell on myth, science, and poetry

Modern thought and culture are deeply shaped by the antithesis between science and myth, math and poetry. Elizabeth Sewell insists there is no antithesis at all. On the contrary, “they are structurally similar activities” (12). The antithesis is old, tidy, and mistaken (19).

People at both poles – scientists and poets – think they know what they’re talking about. Scientists are sure poetry is “a loose, vague, drunken activity . . . neither disciplined nor in contact with reality” (13). Of course, no poet recognizes himself in this description.

Poets, on the other hand, regard science as “quantitative, mechanical, niggling, pedestrian, and . . . vulgarly successful.” No scientist recognizes himself in that description either.

Asked to describe their own practice, both would say this: “poetry and science are activities in which thinker and instrument combine in some situation which is passionately exciting because it is fraught with possibilities of discovery” (14).

Not understanding your opponent is bad enough, but the antithesis robs both sides of self-understanding. Once the scientist sees his work as anti-poetry, it starts resembling the poets’ caricature of science. Poets who portray science as hard and exact are tempted to write wooly-minded and sentimental poetry.

Writers who want to recover the stature of poetry perpetuate the problem. We need to be right-brained, says Iain McGilchrist, which means more poetic and, by implication, less rigorously scientific.

For Sewell, the cause of the antithesis is a rejection of myth.