Sir Humphry Davy’s unpublished poetry found in notebooks

In a previous (pre-tech) life I was a historian and believe it or not, actually looked at these notebooks in the Davy archives during my PhD. It’s cool to see this turn up on hacker news. Although, I’m sorry to say, Davy wasn’t really a very good poet - even if florid romanticism is to your taste.

Minor gripe: the poetry wasn’t really “discovered” in the notebooks. Historians already knew Davy wrote poetry and that this stuff was in there. What is happening is that this is being properly transcribed and made widely available for the first time, which is awesome. It’s a shame that every popular journalist writing about historians’ work has to sex it up as some kind of dramatic archival discovery. (In the business we used to joke about how every so often a journalist would write about a “discovery” that Isaac Newton was into alchemy, when that had been known for over a century.) In fact, you can perfectly well do brilliant and novel historical work with archival sources that people have looked at many time before.

Sir Humphry Davy abominated gravy. He lived in the odium of having discovered sodium. --Clerihew

Richard Holmes wrote a great book called "The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science" which covers Humphry Davy as well as other late 18th-century/early 19th century figures such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge (who was a friend of Davy's and who was an amateur chemist as well as a professional poet just as Davy was the reverse).

> He is famous for discovering elements of the periodic table, for inventing a lamp in 1815 that would save the lives of hundreds of thousands of miners and as an electrochemical pioneer. But it is the unpublished poetry of the British chemist Sir Humphry Davy – and the intriguing connections between his poems and scientific breakthroughs – that is now electrifying academics.