Poetry and science may have different ways to assess the truth of their results, but they pursue these truths with similar methods: observation, measurement and classification, and through the formulation, testing and modification of hypotheses.
Objectives: Students can describe and analyze several elements common to science and poetry, and can discuss the way poets use those common elements in literature. Students can discuss how poetic thinking (such as comparison and speculation) contributes to scientific thinking (such as naming, categorization, and developing hypotheses). Students can incorporate these insights into coherent analyses of individual texts.
Advanced Objective: Students can approach “experimental” texts in terms of a hypothesis— whereby a literary work attempts to test by experiment—and to connect the experiment to a discussion of ideas. Broadly, students can identify rational methodologies in literature’s approach to language and the exercise of the imagination in designing experiments and interpreting data.