Preface
Preface
As a mineral exploration geologist I spent a career thinking about discovery: what it is, how it happens, and how it feels. Now I try to find the same rewards in poetry, because each new combination of words which works is a discovery. Something new is discovered in words which were there all the time. Of course, it only works on rare occasions.
Proust said: “I had arrived then at the conclusion that in fashioning a work of art we are by no means free, that we do not choose how we shall make it but that it pre-exists us and therefore we are obliged, since it is both necessary and hidden, to do what we should have to do if it were a law of nature — to discover it.” And Proust speaks of analogy as pointing to the essences of things; and of “the miracle of analogy”. These are concepts at the heart of scientific discovery. Reading Keats’ “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer” I know that it is describing the feeling I had when I first made a discovery of a hidden likeness in mineral exploration, and this makes me think that the moment of discovery in the arts and in science is the same.
On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer