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Wondering if Wallace Steven’s First Idea (from Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction) might better be seen through the lens of scientific revolution than of poetic discovery.

The first idea is the reality which Newton/ Galileo saw “without the varnish” of Aristotelian ideas. It is the reality, the phenomena, that Einstein saw without the varnish of Newtonian ideas. Einstein is a poet looking past Newtonian assumptions to arrive at a new idea of the elemental nature of the universe, the “first idea.” Maybe?

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