On an open mystery in the tributes to Sir Francis Bacon, as Apollo or Orpheus

[Light-of-Truth]

This interesting article is on Medium by Heroes in the Seaweed:

On an open mystery in the tributes to Sir Francis Bacon, as Apollo or Orpheus

[Light-of-Truth]

Sharing a few lines from the article:

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The romantics, the poets, and their Bacon

In a way that we can find inscrutable, Francis Bacon enjoyed an unlikely adoration amongst many (although not all) romantic poets of the 19th century.

Perce Bysshe Shelley remarks of the philosopher in his Defence of Poetry that: “Lord Bacon was a poet. His language has a sweet and majestic rhythm which satisfies the sense, no less than the almost superhuman wisdom of his philosophy satisfies the intellect.” (Shelley 2013)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge went further, arguing that Bacon’s approach to natural philosophy is misunderstood as being wholly mechanical. For Coleridge, Bacon’s conception of the inner essence of natural processes (natura naturans) invokes a “mode of knowing” akin to that of the poets. Just as Hadot describes the Orphic attitude, this form of Baconian knowing for Coleridge involved “some power that stands in human nature but [also] in some participation of the eternal and the universal by which man is enabled to question, nay to contradict, the irresistible impressions of his own sense …” (Coleridge 1949, 376; cf. Dahlia 2018)

Nor did the Baconian vogue of the 19th century, that culminated in his nomination by Mark Twain, Friedrich Nietzsche, Georg Cantor, and others as the hidden “Shake-spear” author, find no antecedents in Bacon’s own time.

Ben Jonson, poet-laureate and friend of William Shakespeare, nominated not the bard, but the philosopher, as “[h]e who hath filled up all numbers [viz. a word for the organisation of lines of verse] and performed that in our tongue which may be compared or preferred to insolent Greece and haughty Rome … so that he may be named as the mark and acme of our language.” (Jonson 1931) Bacon’s lifelong friend, the recusant Tobie Mathews, described the philosopher as:

A man so rare in knowledge, of so many severall kinds, endued with the facility and felicity of expressing it all, in so elegant, significant, so abundant, and yet so choise and ravishing way of words, of Metaphors, and Allusions, as, perhaps, the world hath not seen, since it was the world. (Matthew 1660, 38)

What has happened here? Why is it that we have seemingly become so deaf to language that it appears as though Bacon’s fame as a fandi fictor, creator of speeches, has been simply lost to scholarship?
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