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Another example of notable interaction between literature and chemistry in the beginning of the nineteenth century – no less famous than Goethe’s novel – is the direct influence the chemist Humphry Davy had on Wordsworth and Coleridge, and the romantic conjunction of chemistry, poetry, and philosophical worldview which Sharon Ruston comments on in her chapter (see supra). In the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1800/1802), Wordsworth defines poetry – the “image of man and nature” – as the pursuit of truth, and pleasure as the effect of both poetic and scientific truth. The Poet is attentive to the naked manifestations of natural laws, of movements in and outside his mind; he is:

… a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the Universe. (Wordsworth, p. 13)

In analogy (we would say) with the chemist’s experimentation with dynamic principles and processes in matter, Wordsworth’s poet experiences, contemplates, and communicates powerful “elementary feelings”, and pays homage to “the grand elementary principle of pleasure, by which he knows, and feels, and lives, and moves”. It is characteristic of the period that Wordsworth’s prophetic sentence on the future reconciliation of poetry and science pays a special tribute to chemistry, as well as to the neighbouring disciplines and suppliers of those vegetal and mineral substances the chemist’s experiments depend on:

The remotest discoveries of the Chemist, the Botanist, or Mineralogist, will be as proper objects of the Poet’s art as any upon which it can be employed, if the time should ever come when these things shall be familiar to us, and the relations under which they are contemplated by the followers of these respective Sciences shall be manifestly and palpably material to us as enjoying and suffering beings. If the time should ever come when what is now called Science, thus familiarized to men, shall be ready to put on, as it were, a form of flesh and blood, the Poet will lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration, and will welcome the Being thus produced, as a dear and genuine inmate of the household of man. (Wordsworth, p. 17)

This possibility of reconciliation presupposes an already suggested analogy, not just between science and poetry as providers of pleasure, but between chemistry and poetry as formative processes, active in external nature as well as in the human mind. This romantic conception is reminiscent of the alchemical worldview and the hermetic idea of a correspondence between the micro- and the macro-cosmos, applying to spiritual and practical operations, to animate and inanimate matter, and to processes natural and supernatural. A prescientific consciousness resonates in the anthropomorphism of traditional poetry as well as in the rhetoric of romanticism and symbolism. In alchemy the minerals suffer, marry, and give birth to new life; and likewise, from Ficino and Paracelsus to Jung, the workings of the elements may be recognised within the faculties of the human soul. Modern poets – as the final section of this volume will show – may still exploit a “strange alchemy of thought” (Poe), experience “The alchemy of pain” (Baudelaire), or experiment with “The Alchemy of the Word” (Rimbaud).

The idea of a special affinity between chemistry and poetry is indebted to alchemy, but it seems to have flourished most intensely around 1800, in the period of transition after which chemistry emerges as a modern science. In the entry “Alchymistes” in the French Encyclopédie (1751-72), Diderot is quoted to have said that:

Chemistry imitates and competes with nature; its object is almost as vast as nature itself: this part of Physics is among the others, what Poetry is among the other genres of literature: either it decomposes beings or regenerates them or transforms them & c.¹²

Following the same encyclopedia’s classification of human knowledge, the category of “poetry” includes all artistic forms that can be related to the “imagination”. The correspondence between chemistry – “Nature’s rival and corrector” – and the beaux arts resides in their imitation and enhancement of nature. Coleridge’s writing on the transformative, “fusing power” of the imagination – which “dissolves, diffuses, dissipates in order to re-create” – also bares traces of chemical inspiration. And Baudelaire seems to paraphrase and develop the ideas of both of his predecessors as he attributes the qualities Diderot sees in chemistry and poetry to the Imagination, “the Queen of faculties”:

All the other faculties are subordinate to it. It engages in both analysis and synthesis and yet is more than these. (…) It decomposes all creation, and from the materials, accumulated and arranged according to rules whose origin is found only in the depths of the soul, it creates a new world, it produces the sensation of novelty. Since it has created the world, (…) it is only right that it should govern it. (Baudelaire, II p. 622)

Coleridge’s proposition – “Imagination is possibly in man a lesser degree of the creative power of God” – strengthens the recurrent association of poet and chemist as demiurge makers. This status is not only reminiscent of alchemy; it reflects the new prestige of chemistry in the hierarchy of the sciences. David Knight makes clear how chemistry – especially through its growing practical and speculative comprehension of oxygen, magnetism and electricity – replaces mechanics as the dominating science, and becomes the fundamental key to understanding nature and life. As “the fundamental science” it is considered capable of answering fundamental questions, and gains special relevance for philosophers like Hegel and Schelling, who asks:

What then is that secret bond which couples our mind to Nature, or that hidden organ through which Nature speaks to our Mind or our Mind to Nature? (Schelling, p. 41)

For many romantics this organ is the imagination, which in likeness with the new chemistry of vital forces and transformations reaches down into a living reality’s primordial ground. This is in accordance with the thinking of the influential sixteenth-century physicist and alchemist Paracelsus – a Faustian figure well known to the romantics – for whom the imagination conveys a supernatural transformative power (“magica imaginatio”) akin to the transformative potential of faith (Weeks, p. 140). When Jean Starobinski, in his short history of the imagination, sums up the tradition of medical thought that construed the imagination not only as a mimetic but as a vital and creative source of genius, it is no coincidence that the physicians and philosophers he mentions were all informed by and practised in alchemy and chemistry: “From Paracelsus to Van Helmont, to Fludd and Digby, to Boehme, to Stahl, to Mesmer and to the romantic philosophers (…) ideas were to be transmitted.” (Starobinski, p. 186).

Literature and chemistry can merge metaphorically in many ways, as they are both powerful manipulators of the imagination. Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie confirms how the enlightened craft and science of chemistry continued to be associated with secrecy, magic, and illusionism.¹³ Illusion-making is an overlapping area of chemistry and art; hallucinogenic drugs are only one example of this link. The romantics brought poetic feeling and sensation closer to the natural world, but through Davy’s experiments with chemically-induced inspiration, Coleridge and de Quincey’s experiences with opium, and Baudelaire’s with hash, romantic chemists, essayists, and poets also introduced their readers to artificial or “pharmaceutical paradises”, comparable in many respects to the paradises of art. In the twentieth century, Aldous Huxley and Henri Michaux carried out similar chemical experiments with mescaline and LSD, the latter in a scientific setting. Reports of chemical-poetical experimentation often include experiences of merging of the outside and inside worlds, in terms of anthropomorphic correspondences, sometimes reminiscent of alchemical hermetism.

Chemistry’s dominance over the literary imagination in the romantic age was supplanted by biology, owing to the impact of Darwinism on human self-understanding. Zola’s essay “The Experimental Novel” (1880) illustrates the transition, as he aligns himself with the physiologist Claude Bernard to recommend that novel writing should follow the experimental method of chemistry. And while Einsteinian physics inspired much literature in the twentieth century, science fiction included, we are now said to be in the age of neurology, “neuromania” being the new catchword.¹⁴ As future realities are expected to be more and more synthetic, and biochemical engineers steadily increase their capacity to adjust human genetic material, moods, desires, life rhythms, gender, growth, fertility, ageing, and all general body functions, we can expect that chemistry will renew its presence in literature, and that the role of biochemistry in shaping a new medically manipulable humankind will continue to activate the alchemical topos of the homunculus.

This volume’s final section, Poetics of Chemistry and Alchemy, begins with Margery Vibe Skagen’s chapter, which is entitled “‘The phosphorescence of putrefaction and the scent of thunderstorms’: Approaching a Baudelairean Metaphor by Way of Literature and Chemistry”. It explores the relation between creative imagination and early chemistry as manifested in Baudelaire’s aesthetic writing, and more specifically the literary, medical, chemical, and alchemical connotations that nourish the recurring figure of phosphorescence. Through a close reading of a significant extract, which describes the sublime, “phosphorescent” art of Poe and Delacroix, this figure is defined as a structuring metaphor that encompasses essential components of the poet-critic’s supernaturalism.

Brita Lotsberg Bryn’s chapter, “Pasternak’s Wassermann Test”, takes as its starting point a polemical article written by the famous Russian author during his brief futurist period, and focuses on the inspiration he drew from recent biochemical discoveries. This fruitful dialogue with chemistry may, as Brita Lotsberg Bryn argues, have influenced Pasternak’s “metonymical system”. The chapter demonstrates how this system is realised in his third volume of poems, My Sister Life, and rendered theoretically in his article “The Wassermann Test”.

The conjunction of alchemy and poetry did not cease to be relevant with the decline of romanticism. Michael Grote’s chapter, which concludes the present collection, is entitled “‘der stein der weisen ist blau’: Alchemistic Thought in Konrad Bayer’s Literary Work”, and it informs us that “linguistic alchemy” is a recurring topic in German and Austrian experimental literature after the Second World War. While assessing the Austrian writer and poet Konrad Bayer’s literary debut, “der stein der weisen”, Grote clarifies how the link between alchemistic thought and experimental literature becomes apparent as an aspect of text production, or poiesis.