It's not so bad

I did not see the Romantic poets as being as negative towards Newton as everyone else seems to think they were. It is true that Keats and Co. lament that Newton has reduced the beauty of the rainbow by reducing it to a prism, but yet Newton did open up a whole new arena in which poetry could operate. In fact, many of these poets seem to be finding poetry in the very discoveries of Newton themselves. Thomson says “Did ever poet image aught so fair, Dreaming in whispering groves, by the hoarse brook! Or prophet, to whose rapture heaven descends? E’en now the setting sun and shifting clouds, Seen, Greenwich, from thy lovely heights, declare How just, how beauteous the refractive law.” Thomson seems to almost deify Newton and his accomplishments. Blake also seems to place reverence on actual science and knowledge as opposed to “the idiot questioner who is always questioning But never capable of answering.” Even further than this, by advancing knowledge forward, more than anything else, Newton has opened up far more mystery and beauty to write about than there was before his time. After Newton the philosopher or the poet can now muse on what is this strange phenomena of gravity, or absolute space or time. In fact, things were much simpler and less was left to the imagination just a few years before when the universe was explained by blind faith in the descriptions of the Bible. More questions are raised the further knowledge progresses, providing more and more subject matter on which to ponder.