| This dissertation asks to what extent can the poetry of John Donne, Andrew Marvell, and John Wilmot, the earl of Rochester be understood as responding to and critiquing the epistemological shift inaugurated by Francis Bacon. In his call for a grand instauration of learning, Bacon advocates what he labels a "charitable" knowledge that would harness "Nature" in order to ameliorate the human physical condition. Opposing the humanist veneration of classical learning, Bacon advocated the accumulation of empirical data to discover and manipulate or dominate Nature's hidden processes. For the last twenty years, many scholars have analyzed the "objective science" that Bacon (and his "method" to purge the mind of illusions) claimed to have established, and many scholars have critiqued the consequences of this "scientific mind" on the natural world and on those subjects who were denied the capacity to attain it. Indeed, such critiques were already present among seventeenth-century scientists and philosophers. But few have looked---as I do---to seventeenth-century poetry as a site from which such a critique was launched.;My research aims to complicate the cultural reception of the nascent scientific thought by recovering the conversation that Donne, Marvell, and Rochester engage in with Bacon. While each poet responds to a different facet of Bacon's epistemological project, all indict the new scientific mind as leading humanity further into postlapsarian thought. Rather than coming closer to God through a material understanding of Nature, these poets condemn such a perspective as fetishistic. In my discussion of Donne and the new science, I argue that John Donne's Devotions upon Emergent Occasions counters Bacon's claim that only "torture" can elicit the "truth" by proposing, alternately, that the object must willingly comply to the subject's investigation of it. Furthermore, I suggest the relevance that Donne's question of the epistemology of torture has for "The Dampe," "Love's Exchange," and Holy Sonnet XIV. My second chapter reads Andrew Marvell's "The Mower's Song" as a refutation of Bacon's tropology that links sexual maturation with the development of human learning. For Bacon, to read Nature as a sexualized other to be dominated would restore humanity to Edenic supremacy over the natural world. Yet, while Damon comes to recognize his environment on the terms that Bacon proscribes, he only discovers alienation and death. Finally, my last chapter interprets the despair voiced by the speakers of Rochester's "A Satyr Against Mankind and Reason" and "Absent from thee" in light of Bacon's effort to declare that nothing exits within the mind's scope but the material world. Exploring the dialogue between poetry and science, my work illuminates not only the anxiety voiced by these poets towards the new philosophy but the relevance their resistance has to our own epistemological moment. |
