There's a great book called "Age of Wonder: The Romantic Generation and the Discovery of the Beauty and Terror of Science" by Richard Holmes that is about the p

There's a great book called "Age of Wonder: The Romantic Generation and the Discovery of the Beauty and Terror of Science" by Richard Holmes that is about the period between Newton and Darwin in which science and art were mixed -- you had poets like Coleridge who were amateur chemists (no, he wasn't making his own drugs, to spare the obvious joke given his habits), and chemists like Humphrey Davy who were amateur poets.