Contents

List of Contributors

Acknowledgements

Introduction

John Holmes

Part I.  Science and Contemporary Poetry: Cross-Cultural Soundings

1  The Function of Antagonism: Miroslav Holub and Roald Hoffmann

Helen Small

2  Cutting and Pasting: Language Writing and Molecular Biology

Peter Middleton

3  The Poetics of Consilience: Edward O. Wilson and A. R. Ammons

John Barnie

4  Poetry, Science and the Contemporary University

Robert Crawford

Part II. Science in Modernist Poetry: Appropriations and Interrogations

5  ‘Strange Synthetic Perfumes’: Investigating Scientific Diction in Twentieth-Century Poetry

Michael H. Whitworth

6  The Human Animal: Biological Tropes in Interwar Poetry

Tim Armstrong

7  William Empson, Ants and Aliens

Katy Price

8  Ezra Pound and the Materiality of the Fourth Dimension

Ian F. A. Bell

Part III.  Darwinian Dialogues: Four Modern Poets

9  ‘Accidental Variations’: Darwinian Traces in Yeats’s Poetry

Rónán McDonald

10  Making the Past Wake: Anthropological Survivals in Hardy’s Poetry

Andrew Radford

11  Reading Bishop Reading Darwin

Jonathan Ellis

12  From Bergson to Darwin: Evolutionary Biology in the Poetry of Judith Wright

John Holmes

Afterword

Bruce Clarke

Bibliography

Index

1. Poets

2. Scientists and scientific disciplines

3. Other references