It was a formal Friday Night Discourse, with an invited audience in evening dress, and I was asked to put on an unaccustomed dinner jacket and bow tie. My announced subject was ‘The Coleridge Experiment’. The aim was to explore that particularly controversial meeting between science and poetry when Humphry Davy, shortly after starting the Bakerian Lectures in 1808, had gallantly risked his reputation by bringing Coleridge-then in the depth of opium addiction and a fierce marital crisis-to give an extended series of fourteen lectures on the Imagination, before a distinguished invited scientific audience at the Royal Institution. My own lecture was intended to describe the utter chaos that had ensued, but also the few wonderful visionary moments that had been sparked by Coleridge, and which had subsequently shaped much of the modern concept of creativity, and the notion of the imaginative leap.♣Just before starting, I stood behind the closed double doors to the historic lecture theatre, trembling slightly as I heard the solemn growl of the audience on the other side.
