Patterns of Creativity
UNDERSTANDING THE TEXT
1. How does Shelley’s attitude to science differ from that of
Wordsworth and Keats?
Answer:
2. ‘It is not an accident that the most discriminating literary
criticism of Shelley’s thought and work is by a distinguished
scientist, Desmond King-Hele.’ How does this statement bring
out the meeting point of poetry and science?
Answer:
3. What do you infer from Darwin’s comment on his indifference
to literature as he advanced in years?
Answer:
4. How do the patterns of creativity displayed by scientists differ
from those displayed by poets?
Answer:
5. What is the central argument of the speaker?
Answer:
TALKING ABOUT THE TEXT
Discuss in small groups
1. ‘Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’.
Answer:
2. Poetry and science are incompatible.
Answer:
3. ‘On reading Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry, the question insistently
occurs why there is no similar A Defence of Science written by a
scientist of equal endowment.’
APPRECIATION
1. How does the ‘assortment of remarks’ compiled by the author
give us an understanding of the ways of science and poetry?
Answer:
2. Considering that this is an excerpt from a lecture, how does the
commentary provided by the speaker string the arguments
together?
Answer:
3. The Cloud ‘fuses together a creative myth, a scientific
monograph, and a gay picaresque tale of cloud adventure’—
explain.
Answer:
1. How do the words in bold, in the lines below, illustrate the poet’s
ability to convey criticism cryptically?
Our meddling intellect
Misshapes the beauteous forms of things:
We murder to dissect.
2. Explain the contradiction in the similies, ‘Like a child from the
womb, like a ghost from the tomb’.
3. Explain the metaphor in the line: ‘Poets are ... the mirrors of
gigantic shadows that futurity casts on the present’.
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