Wordsworth and the Geologists

Examination of the links between literary history and science provides valuable new insights for scholars across a range of disciplines. John Wyatt explores the unexpectedly close relationship between William Wordsworth and a group of scientists in the formative years of the new science of geology. Wyatt's study of this personal and intellectual friendship challenges the simplistic opposition between Romantic-literary and scientific-materialist cultures, and shows how discourses were affected by the network of influences between poetry and geology.