This book is a direct result of the founding of the British Society for Literature and Science in 2006. Successive conferences of the BSLS at the Universities of Glasgow, Central England, Keele, Reading, Northumbria and Cambridge have shown modern poetry to be one of the richest areas for research in literature and science today. The first three of these conferences coincided with my own research towards a book on responses to Darwinism in Victorian and modern poetry. As I was writing that book, I found that published collections of essays on literature and science barely discussed modern poetry at all. It was this disjuncture between the impression of the field given by these earlier books and the stimulating research that was going on around me that led me to propose a collection of essays specifically about science in modern poetry. As well as inspiring this book, the BSLS forms in large part the academic and social network out of which it has been born. Over half of the contributors are members of the BSLS, and many of us have come to know one another and each other’s work better through the Society and its conferences. Two of the essays in this book were presented as plenary lectures at BSLS conferences, while several others build on papers given at the BSLS. The extent to which these essays speak to one another is in large part thanks to the BSLS and to the organisers of its conferences. I would like to thank in particular its two founders, Alice Jenkins and Michael Whitworth, for bringing the BSLS into being and for doing so much to encourage and foster work in this field, and Alice again, Stuart Robertson, Sharon Ruston, Vike Plock and Peter Garratt for organising the excellent conferences which provided the intellectual testing ground for so many of the ideas in this book.
As editor, I owe a debt of gratitude to all the other contributors, while we variously owe each other debts, both for advice on these essays specifically and more generally for support in working in our common field. I would like to thank the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Reading for its support, in particular for a term of research leave in spring 2011, during which I prepared the typescript. Michael Whitworth and I both gratefully acknowledge the Leverhulme Trust for granting Research Fellowships in support of his research project ‘Science, Poetry, and Specialisation, 1900–1942’, from which his chapter derives, and my project on ‘Darwinism, Poetry and Poetics’, during which I began working on evolution in Wright’s poetry. Katy Price would like to thank Adam Piette for his helpful and perceptive comments on her essay, and Michael Whitworth thanks Sarah Hanks and Charles Whalley for stimulating discussions about science and poetry. We would all like to thank Anthony Cond and his team at Liverpool University Press for supporting this project and seeing it through to publication, and Ralph Footring in particular for his scrupulous copy-editing, which has saved us several minor and one or two more significant embarrassments.
All but one of the essays included in this book is published here for the first time. The exception is Ian Bell’s ‘Ezra Pound and the Materiality of the Fourth Dimension’, which was first published in a slightly different form as ‘The Poundian Fourth Dimension’ in Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations, 11.2 (October 2007), pp. 61–84. We are grateful to the editor and publishers of that journal for the permission to reprint the essay here. We gratefully acknowledge the following sources for the permission to reproduce copyright material in this book: Bloodaxe Books, for ‘Whale Songs’ and ‘Intensive Care Unit’ from Miroslav Holub’s Poems Before and After: Collected English Translations (Bloodaxe Books, 2006); Roald Hoffmann, for his poems ‘Heat: Hot, as _____: Cold’, ‘Grand Unification’ and ‘Giving In’; Lyn Hejinian, for her poem ‘Exploration Takes Extra Words’ from The Cell (Sun and Moon Press, 1992) and for extracts from ‘A Pause, a Rose, Something on Paper’ and ‘The Plow Makes Trough Enough’ from the first version of her book My Life (Burning Deck, 1980); Pan Macmillan, for Kathleen Jamie’s ‘The Glass-Hulled Boat’ from The Tree House (Copyright © Kathleen Jamie, 2004); Curtis Brown, for William Empson’s ‘The Ants’; ETT Imprint, for Judith Wright’s ‘Conch-shell’ from A Human Pattern: Selected Poems (Sydney: ETT Imprint, 2010); and HarperCollins, for the extract from Wright’s ‘Pain’, from Judith Wright, Collected Poems. The quotation from Michael Roberts’s letter to Richard Eberhart in Chapter 5 appears courtesy of Dartmouth College Library and Professor Andrew Roberts, whose co-operation in providing a copy of Roberts’s ‘List of Verses’ is also gratefully acknowledged.