(2018 midterm assignment) Sample Student Midterm Answers 2018 #2a: Short Essay (Passage) (index)

LITR 4328 American Renaissance

Kristina Koontz

Dull Realities: Is Science Really Killing Imagination?

Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!

Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes. 

Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart,

Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?

How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise,

Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering

To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,

Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?

Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car?

And driven the Hamadryad from the wood   

To seek a shelter in some happier star?

Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,

The Elfin from the green grass, and from me

The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?

Before any analysis of this poem, some historical context must be supplied to better understand it. The Romantic period, or the American Renaissance, occurred directly afterwards and perhaps as consequence to the previous Age of Reason, where science took center stage and reigned as king. Many scientific advancements took place in that former period, including improved hygiene, longer lifespans, steam power and electricity to name just a handful, and those sound great. Progress! But that is not what the ensuing Romantic period thought of it. Romantics saw the Enlightenment’s science as losing an emotional attachment to the world, and thus the loss of wonder, and they subsequently focused much more on the emotional impact of the world. A romantic did not need science to understand that a flower is beautiful, nor did they want to know, for learning the why and how of that beauty would ruin the experience of it. Is it not enough to simply appreciate? Is it necessary to break down and analyze everything?

The first quatrain of Poe’s poem might be the most outwardly disparaging of Enlightenment perspectives on the world in its phrasing. Wisdom, or Science as he calls her, previously made manifest in the Greek goddess Athena, the “daughter of Old Time” who is born from the split skull of Zeus and thus is thought personified, goes from a thing admired and worshipped to a “vulture, whose wings are dull realities.” Vultures are symbols of death that feed on corpses. That is the opinion of the romantic writer, that science explains so much, too much, that there is no room for wonder any more, that wonder has died. Science makes reality banal. Poe, as a poet, is upset that science has made reality “dull.” He no longer has that emotional attachment to the world because science has explained it away in prosaic terms and left no room for imagination. But the vulture description has another meaning to it. Vultures are generally signifiers of doom for the way they circle above. If there are vultures circling, something bad has happened or will happen. This could be Poe perhaps warning that science will cause or already has caused problems, such as the industrial revolution. A lot of romantics disliked this new progress because it damaged nature, which is why pastoralism and nostalgia are intertwined with the romantic period. The industrial revolution started out small-scale and benign in America, unlike in Europe. Poe might be warning that science in American could lead to the same issue. Science is a double-edged sword after all. It can lead to great good or great harm depending on how a discovery is used.

The Enlightenment left such an impact on the perspective of the human being that he describes that analytical mindset of science would “not leave to his wandering/to seek for treasure in the jewelled sky.” Science is like a fly pestering him – once that mindset has been revealed and utilized he finds it hard not to see the world in such a dispassionate way; he wants to see the treasures in the clouds. He wants to see the bunny or the elephant in them, not just condensed water blobs. Even though he (the poet) soars on an “undaunted wing” he cannot stop science from pestering him. He is upset that science has “dragged Diana from her car.” He wants to see the Hamadryad, the Naiad, and the Elf in the forest and waters, but more importantly, he is upset that science has taken his “summer dream beneath the tamarind tree” from him. In Poe’s eyes, science cannot instill wonder, it cannot inspire imagination, and has taken his ability to daydream from him. The poet must be able to dream and imagine, and science, in Poe’s eyes, doesn’t allow for that. It offers too many answers that are mundane to a romantic poet like Poe.

Granted, this is Poe. He is known for being melodramatic. Science is hardly killing his imagination (just look at Emerson’s grandiose descriptions) and science is hardly making reality dull. Science created by man is responsible for things like fireworks that make life beautiful. Science can bring imagination to life – the printing press allows a writer to put his thoughts into paper and mass produce, and science is further responsible in recent years for virtual and augmented reality, where we can bring imaginary things as close to real life as we can through simulation.  There is beauty in science and in nature – the two are not diametrically opposed. The Fibonacci sequence is described as the mathematical beauty of nature because so many beautiful things in the universe follow it, from tiny shells to entire galaxies. A star isn’t just nuclear reaction, they’re atomic bombs exploding for million or billions of years – that’s not dull, that’s sublime-level awesome. Poe can’t see that or perhaps doesn’t want to. He only sees the prosaic side of science and its discoveries, not the beautiful, slightly terrifying side.