A new book The Poetry and Music of Science recounts the written and oral narratives of projects within both sciences and arts, finding that the ‘Two Cultures’ constitute a very poor categorisation of creative modes. A far better one identifies the (i) visual; (ii) textual and (iii) abstract modes of imaginative thought that play out across disciplines and in sciences as much as in arts and humanities. In this lecture we focus on the deep entanglements between fictional writing and experimental science, starting with their common early-modern origin, and asking why Wordsworth’s vision of science-inspired poetry has not been realised. The Ars Poetica genre of Henry James Art of the Novel and physiologist William Beveridge’s Art of Scientific Investigation reveal another common narrative plot: the story of human creativity itself.