American Literature / Unit 8 AML 0711 short lesson, about 20 seconds
"Sonnet—To Science" and Poe's Quarrel With the Age
Captions available
The idea
Poe's early sonnet addresses science as a vulture whose dull realities prey on the poet's heart, driving the naiad from the flood and the elf from the grass. The complaint is Romantic in the strict sense: explanation is treated as a theft from imagination.
In practice
Science as a vulture, hunting myth.
Where people slip
The quarrel is with explanation, not with knowledge.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
Builds on
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