One of the poems in Walt Whitman's 1855 anthology Leaves of Grass describes the tension between scientific explanation and direct experience through the lens of astronomy and observation. Describing poetry is generally useless, so you're much better off reading the poem here:
"When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer"
I have mixed feelings about Walt Whitman. As someone who falls in love easily with places and nature, I identify most of the way with his romanticism, but there always seemed to be an unfortunate undercurrent of anti-intellectualism in his work to me. That said, "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer" makes perfect sense to me after a year in the murky depths of graduate school. It's easy to measure quantitative things, and the academic world is merciless in reducing everything within reach into a pile of numbers to be chewed up for breakfast in the latest numerical simulation. The numbers, the charts, the figures, and the proofs all mean something, and with any luck it actually corresponds to something in the real world, but it's nice to get out and actually enjoy that mystical moist night air in perfect silence every once in a while.
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