Thiria-Meulemans, Aurélie <br/><br/>
“Science of Feelings”: On the Complementarity between Science and Poetry in Wordsworth 

 -  2011.<br/>							 
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<br/><br/> The anti-scientific bias of the first generation of Romantic poets is well-known, and Wordsworth is no exception. His famous “we murder to dissect” advocates a direct apprehension of Nature that runs against scientific methods. His portrait of an infant prodigy in the fourth book of The Prelude even reads as a satire of the scientific approach of nature, the proper attitude being described, a few dozen lines further, through the character of the Winander Boy. Yet this rejection should be qualified inasmuch as the communion with Nature so often depicted is not exclusive of a questioning of her. On looking closer, one might even think that the poet is something of the scientist’s counterpart, he who “[carries] sensation into the midst of the object of the Science itself.”