On what poetry does that scientific data cannot do

    List every physical and behavioral fact about eagles, say, and the list misses the soul of eagles. Poetry shows us the soul and our feeling for it. The poet is Alfred Lord Tennyson:

                   The Eagle
He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring'd with the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.

    Imagine a world in which only facts are permitted to be expressed, and you have imagined a world without music, dance, painting, and poetry.

    For a brief biography of Alfred Lord Tennyson, click here.