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 t

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.