The only oriental poet at all well known in England, Omar Khayyam, was a Persian astronomer. Pythagoras lived before Aeschylus had created Greek drama. And Plato, who did not tolerate poets in his ideal state, was a scholar when Aristophanes closed the eyes of Greek drama. The example of these men in science as much as in art set the modern world afire in the Renaissance. And the type and symbol of Renaissance man was from the beginning and remains Leonardo da Vinci, painter, sculptor, mathematician, and engineer.
Science changes our values in two ways.
It injects new ideas into the familiar culture. And it subjects it to the pressure of technical change, in the way I have just been describing, until the whole basis of our culture has imperceptibly been remade. The invention of printing does not seem to bear very directly on the content of poetry. But when a poem can be read and read again, it is natural that the interest shifts from the rhythm to the meaning and the allusion. So the invention of photography has made the painter and the patron lose interest in the likeness and transfer it to some more formal pattern.