I
At the beginning of the twentieth century the English poet Robert Bridges declared:
History and SCIENCE our playthings are: what an untold
Wealth of inexhaustive treasure is stored up for amusement!
(ll. 76–77)
Taking geology as his first example, he continued:
Shall not the celestial earth-ball
Equally entertain a mature enquiry, reward our
Examination of its contexture, conglomerated
Of layer’d debris, the erosion of infinite ages?
Tho’ I lack the wizard Darwin’s scientific insight
On the barren sea-beaches of East Patagonia gazing,
I must wond’ring attend, nay learn myself to decipher
Time’s rich hieroglyph, with vast elemental pencil
Scor’d upon Earth’s rocky crust […]
(ll. 82–90)
Bridges’s poem, entitled Now in Wintry Delights (1903), seems fustily antique, yet it anticipates surprisingly precisely poetry’s wider engagement with science in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. On the one hand, Bridges defers to science. He promises to ‘attend’ to its teaching, to ‘learn’ its methods, in order to advance his own understanding. Educated in classics at Oxford in the 1860s, Bridges had retrained in medicine at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London in the early 1870s. He went on to work as a physician in a number of hospitals before coming into the private income which allowed him to work full-time on his poetry. Like several other prominent twentieth-century poets – William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore and A. R. Ammons among them – Bridges’s scientific training gave him both a respect for science and a confidence when it came to incorporating it into his poetry. For while Bridges does defer to science, he also takes it as a ‘plaything’, a theme on which a poet can produce variations for his own and others’ ‘amusement’. Bridges’s characterisation of Darwin as a ‘wizard’ is typical of this blending of admiration for scientists’ achievements with an impish playfulness which refuses to take science wholly on its own terms. It suggests too that for a poet, steeped in past lore and literature, science can seem to be – and can instructively be made to appear as – an occult activity. The poet’s role, for Bridges, is not merely to celebrate science or to communicate its findings, but also to transform it into something new, something which, in the act of extending the reach of poetry, sheds new light on science itself. In calling Darwin a wizard, Bridges defamiliarises science and the figure of the scientist. He acknowledges the power of science to transform our understanding, and to charm and even beguile us in the process. At the same time, he implicitly refuses to grant its claim to be the strictly rational and empirical exercise of interrogating a purely material world.
In Now in Wintry Delights Bridges extends the reach of poetry not only by taking science as his subject, but also by experimenting with the materials of poetry itself – with form and language. Indeed, the choice of science as a theme is bound up directly in this poem with the act of creating experimental poetry. Now in Wintry Delights was the first of several poems Bridges wrote to try out a system of metrics based on classical versification originally proposed by his friend William Johnson Stone. The poem itself was thus an experiment in the scientific sense – indeed, one of a series of repeated experiments – designed to test the validity and applicability of Stone’s hypothesis that rich English verse could be written in quantitative metre. Bridges himself saw his experiments as a success. To his ear they revealed ‘a vast unexplored field of delicate and expressive rhythms hitherto unknown in our poetry’ (Bridges, 1936, 408). Among the main sources of these new rhythms was the polysyllabic language of science itself. In the passage quoted above, Bridges weaves terms such as ‘examination’, ‘contexture’, ‘conglomerated’ and ‘erosion’ into his verse. Twenty-five lines later he writes of mankind at large that, through ‘observing, measuring, patiently recording, / He mappeth out the utter wilderness of unlimited space’ (ll. 115–16). Bridges’s own undertaking in his poem is painstakingly to map out a previously uninhabited realm of poetic space – to ‘measure’ the possible space of the diction and sounds of poetry, as well as its imaginative realm. In Now in Wintry Delights and ‘To a Socialist in London’, Bridges’s second experiment with Stone’s prosody, this possible space includes the idioms and ideas of physics, chemistry, geology, medicine, evolutionary biology, archaeology, anthropology, natural history and social Darwinism.
In these poems, science gives Bridges his theme, his experimental method and his language, all inextricably intertwined. At the end of Now in Wintry Delights, he imagines sailing off ‘Piloting into the far, unmapp’d futurity’ (l. 438). Bridges has in mind both the future of science and the future of poetry. Over the ensuing century, several poets would fulfil his prophecy. Poets as diverse as Edna St Vincent Millay, W. H. Auden, William Empson and Amy Clampitt would respond in complex and sophisticated ways to science, building its language, concepts, findings and practices into their poems. Williams, Ezra Pound and Charles Olson would all appeal to science in formulating their own radical, experimental poetics. John Davidson, Hugh MacDiarmid and Edwin Morgan would form a distinctive Scottish tradition of modern poets committed to incorporating the concepts and language of science into original and exploratory verse, while the achievements and influence of Judith Wright and R. S. Thomas respectively would help to ensure the centrality of science within modern Australian and Welsh poetry.
If C. P. Snow’s famous diagnosis of a rift between the ‘two cultures’ of science and letters has rarely been applicable to modern poets, today his model looks less apt than ever. Over the last twenty-five years, poets and scientists have been taking a more and more lively interest in each other’s work and working methods. In Britain, this development was signalled by the publication in June 1987 of a special issue of the magazine Poetry Review devoted to poetry and science. This issue led with an interview with Peter Redgrove, well known for his close if idiosyncratic engagement with science in his poetry and prose (Roberts and Redgrove, 1987). Following Redgrove, several other prominent poets on both sides of the Atlantic – including Lavinia Greenlaw (1996), Pattiann Rogers (2001) and the Czech poet and immunologist Miroslav Holub (2001) – published essays meditating on the place of science in their own poetry or in more abstract terms on the relationship between science and poetry as activities, disciplines or ways of comprehending and knowing the world. At the same time, high-profile scientists from Edward O. Wilson (1984, 57–81) and Richard Dawkins (1999, 180–209) to James Lovelock (2000, vii–xix) began to make use of the concept of poetry in working through their ideas on the exercise of the scientific imagination and the practices of science and science writing. The botanist Nicholas Battey (2004) published a manifesto in several parts in the Journal of Experimental Botany calling for his fellow biologists to embed their scientific understanding of the natural world within the fuller range of perspectives offered by poetry and the other arts. As Battey was advocating a meeting of disciplines, the poet and critic Robert Crawford was orchestrating several actual meetings, bringing together poets and research scientists in collaborations, each of which bore fruit first in a poem, then in a reflexive essay by the scientist on the poem and the scientific work to which it responds. Crawford gathered these collaborations together with further essays commissioned from poets, including Morgan and Holub, on their views of science and from scientists, including the astronomer Jocelyn Bell Burnell, the psychiatrist Kay Redfield Jamison and Holub again (the same essay) on poetry. Crawford’s book, Contemporary Poetry and Contemporary Science (2006), stands alongside several recent anthologies of poetry about science and one of essays by American poets on poetry and science – Kurt Brown’s The Measured Word (2001) – as a testimony to the prescience of the Poetry Review.
The gathering movement towards what Crawford has called ‘the real possibility of meaningful interchange between poetry and science’ (Crawford, ed., 2006, 5) has coincided with a growing academic attention to the relationship between literature and science. Oddly, however, given how receptive poets and scientists currently are to each other’s work, poetry in general and modern poetry in particular has received less of this attention than it deserves, and the attention it has received has not been widely disseminated. The most influential of the early studies which came to define the field of literature and science – Gillian Beer (1983) and George Levine (1988) on Darwin and Victorian novels, Katherine Hayles (1984) on field theory and post-modern fiction – concentrated on prose rather than verse. In 1993, the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts in America launched its journal Configurations, but it was not until 2009 that it published an article on modern poetry specifically (Emerson, 2009). Since the mid-1980s, a number of collections of scholarly essays on literature and science have been published. Of a sample of fifteen such collections, nine include not a single essay on modern poetry (Jordanova, ed., 1986; Levine, ed., 1987; Amrine, ed., 1989; Peterfreund, ed., 1990; Shaffer, ed., 1991; Bruce and Purdy, eds, 1994; Lévy, ed., 1994; Small and Tate, eds, 2003; Ruston, ed., 2008), four more only one essay each (Slade and Lee, eds, 1990; Hayles, ed., 1991; Shaffer, ed., 1998; Clarke and Henderson, eds, 2002), and a fourteenth two essays, which still does not seem a very high proportion given that the subject of this collection is limited to American literature and science (Scholnick, ed., 1992). Of all of these collections, only one, Philip Coleman’s On Literature and Science: Essays, Reflections, Provocations (2007), gives modern poetry a central and prominent place within the study of literature and science, partly because, like Crawford, Coleman invited poets themselves to contribute.
To a casual observer, then, the academic field of literature and science may seem to have little to say about modern poetry, in spite of Bridges’s prophecy and the clear interest taken in science by contemporary poets. Yet in fact several major studies have explored the interface between science and modern poetry in stimulating and illuminating ways over the last thirty years, and this interface remains the subject of some of the most original research and criticism in the field. In the next section of this introduction I summarise the major contributions to this critical endeavour, drawing out their key findings and identifying the main concerns which have driven this research. My aim is to give scholars and students approaching the topic of science in modern poetry from either side – from an interest either in literature and science or in modern poetry per se – a preliminary map of the field as explored in previous scholarship. In the third and final section of this introduction I will set out how the essays in this book fill in blank spaces on this map, opening up new territories for ever deeper exploration.
II
As with the wider field of literature and science, it was not until the late twentieth century that scholars began to analyse modern poetry in depth in terms of its relationship to science. Earlier in the century, historical studies of poetry and science in general or evolution in particular tended to end with brief surveys of recent poets (Stevenson, 1932, 298–345; Beach, 1936, 522–59; Connor, 1949, 329–74; Bush, 1950, 139–66) or with chapters on Victorian poets who survived into the twentieth century (Crum, 1931, 228–38, on Davidson; Roppen, 1956, 283–316, on Hardy; see also Stevenson, 1932, 237–97, and Beach, 1936, 503–21, on Hardy). A few of the plentiful contributions to polemical debates over the place of literature in a scientific age cited modern poetry, but only here and there (e.g. Levy and Spalding, 1952; Evans, 1954; Rodway, 1964). In a famous series of lectures on Science and the Modern World (1925), the philosopher A. N. Whitehead drew on Romantic poetry in proposing a model of the universe as an organism, which to his mind tallied better than a more mechanistic materialism with the findings of contemporary physics. But although diverse modern poets took a lead from his alignment of poetry with his own scientific philosophy (see Elder, 1985; Steinman, 1987), he said little about contemporary poetry himself. (Whitehead observed that Wordsworth and Shelley were not hostile to science per se, only to the mechanistic worldview of Enlightenment physics – an argument reprised by Mary Midgley in Science and Poetry, her rebuff to Richard Dawkins’s call for poets to celebrate what she sees to be a similarly mechanistic scientism; see Dawkins, 1999, 15–27; Midgley, 2001, 38–58.)
Most of these discussions, including Whitehead’s, addressed what scholars and critics across the mid-twentieth century perceived to be a growing disjuncture between poetry and science, or at least between the hopes of poets and the vision of reality offered them by scientists. The two critics to analyse the problem in the most depth understood this supposed opposition between poetry and science in conflicting ways. I. A. Richards, the most influential British critic of the interwar years, discussed contemporary poetry in the last chapter of his short book Science and Poetry, first published in 1926 and revised in 1935 (1970, 67–79). Richards took Thomas Hardy, Walter de la Mare, W. B. Yeats and D. H. Lawrence as encapsulating in different ways the alienation of the modern poet from the world of science. As he saw it, where the other poets had escaped into fantasies of one kind or another, Hardy alone had ‘steadily refused to be comforted in an age in which the temptation to seek comfort has been greatest’ (68–69). After the Second World War, the American critic Hyatt Waggoner challenged Richards’s argument in the first critical monograph specifically dedicated to the relationship between modern poetry and science, The Heel of Elohim: Science and Values in Modern American Poetry (1950). Reading from a Christian humanist perspective, Waggoner took a much more positive view of poetry as a counterweight to scientific materialism. In his eyes, the poets he discussed – E. A. Robinson, Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Robinson Jeffers, Archibald MacLeish and Hart Crane –successfully resisted the monopoly on truth statements and beliefs claimed by science and largely conceded by Richards.
The main concern of these early studies was with how poetry responds to – or more often reacts against – the worldview of scientific materialism in general. It was only in the 1980s that a number of critics began making a sustained effort to discern in detail how particular sciences were refracted in the work of particular modern poets. This turn paralleled contemporary poets’ own turn towards a more detailed engagement with science. At the same time, it revealed that this was less specific to the contemporary moment than it might have seemed, and that, far from conforming to the critical consensus that poetry and science were antagonistic, poets throughout the twentieth century had sought to incorporate science into their poetry and poetics.
The detailed studies of modern poetry and science which have been written since the early 1980s have had two broad objectives: to define the place and function of science in modernist poetry and poetics, and to determine how science has shaped modern poetry’s view of our place in nature. To date, there has been relatively little overlap between these two critical projects. Where critics of Victorian literature and science began with biology and only recently began to consider physics in detail, critics of modernism and science began with physics and the wider philosophy of science and have only recently and intermittently turned to consider questions of biology. Even then, their main concerns have been with medicine and human physiology, rather than with our relation to the wider non-human world. Critics of modernism and science have tended also to take a historicist approach, grounding their readings in close analyses of poets’ engagement with specific scientific sources among their contemporaries and forebears. For their part, critics looking at how modern poets have responded to evolutionary biology and ecology have not ignored the demands of historicism, but they have tended emphasise what they see to be the enduring currency of their subjects’ worldviews. In this regard, these critics are more closely aligned to ecocriticism as a school than to stricter historicisms. The dramatis personae of the two traditions differ too. Where Pound and Williams have dominated criticism of modernist poetry and science, supported by Yeats, Eliot, Moore and Wallace Stevens, the ecocritical tradition has largely ignored these poets in favour of a counter-tradition headed by Hardy, Jeffers and Frost and including among others Ammons, Gary Snyder and Ted Hughes.
One of the first extensive treatments of modernist poetry and science after Waggoner’s The Heel of Elohim is Ian Bell’s study of Pound’s poetics, Critic as Scientist (1981). Bell aims ‘to demonstrate the relationship between Pound’s use of scientific analogy and the more familiar areas of his critical concerns’, arguing that ‘his efforts to create a poetics informed by the disciplines of science were the characteristic gesture of his modernity’ (1981, 1). He traces in meticulous detail the origins of Pound’s scientific analogies and his transformation of them as he devised his poetics. Where Bell’s book is largely concerned with Pound as a poetic theorist, subsequent critics have taken the logic of its arguments a step further, tracing how the scientific analogies which the modernist poets employed in their aesthetic theories bear on their poems themselves. Martin Kayman builds directly on Bell’s work in The Modernism of Ezra Pound: The Science of Poetry (1986), which sets out Pound’s interest in the scientific phenomenalism of Ernst Mach and Karl Pearson and goes on to trace its influence within The Cantos. In Made in America: Science, Technology, and American Modernist Poets (1987), Lisa Steinman concentrates primarily on the cases made for (their own) poetry by Williams, Moore and Stevens, all of whom invoke a concept of American modernity grounded in technology as the application and manifestation of science. In the last chapter of her dynamic and expansive study Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature, Culture in Modernist America (1987, 230–88), Cecilia Tichi develops a similar line of argument in a reading of Williams’s poetry itself as characterised by a ‘rapid-transit poetics’ (252).
Steinman closes her accounts of both Williams and Stevens by charting a change in their poetics which she traces to Einstein’s new physics. Alan Friedman and Carol Donley anticipate this move in Einstein as Myth and Muse, where they sketch out several modern poets’ responses first to relativity and then more briefly to quantum mechanics (1985, 67–82, 128–34). Michael Whitworth follows up the first of these lines of inquiry in Einstein’s Wake: Relativity, Metaphor, and Modernist Literature (2001), while Daniel Albright and Steven Carter follow the second in Quantum Poetics: Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and the Science of the Modern (1997) and Bearing Across: Studies in Literature and Science (1998) respectively. Whitworth’s discussion of high modernism’s engagement with several concepts and phenomena associated with Einstein’s theories – relativity, thermodynamics, descriptionism, entropy, x-rays, simultaneity, non-Euclidean geometry – takes in examples from poetry as well as from prose fiction, criticism and science writing itself. Albright begins, as Bell, Kayman, Steinman and Tichi do, with the poets’ own analogies before developing and applying one particular analogy himself, between the wave–particle duality of quantum physics and a parallel duality which can be mapped out as a dialectic within the forms and language of modernist poetry. For Albright, Pound elevates the particle in the doctrines of imagism but ends up thinking and writing in waves. Yeats and Eliot, by contrast, open with waves but end up seeking the solidity of particles. Where Albright is freer in his own use of analogy than most critics of modernist poetry and science, Carter returns to a more precise historicism in his discussion of field theory, quantum particles and the uncertainty principle in the thought and poetry of the subsequent generation of American poets, specifically Olson, Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer (1998, 1–74).
Carter’s book steps away from high modernism to a postwar poetry that has been characterised as alternatively late modernist or post-modern. This transition from modernism to post-modernism has been a concern of two important studies of modernist poetry that have concentrated not on physics but on physiology. In Modernism, Medicine, and William Carlos Williams (1993), T. Hugh Crawford takes Williams’s career as a doctor as a starting point for an analysis of changes in the culture of medicine in the early twentieth century. This analysis is conducted through a reading of medical scenarios in Williams’s own writing. At the same time, Crawford traces a shift towards post-modernism in his later poetry, particularly Paterson. Like Friedman and Donley and Steinman, he associates this trend within Williams’s poetry with the model of Einstein’s relativity. Michael Golston too draws attention to Williams’s invoking of Einstein in his recent book Rhythm and Race in Modernist Poetry and Science (2008). Golston’s fascinating study follows Bell’s lead once again in establishing the previously largely unknown basis for Pound’s and Yeats’s theories of rhythm within late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century science, specifically the study and theorisation of vocal and bodily rhythms associated with ideas of race. Golston meticulously teases out allusions to this obsolete science and patterns grounded within it in The Cantos and A Vision, establishing it as a further source for their authors’ authoritarian politics. In his closing chapter, Golston points out that Williams, by contrast, rejects both their insistence on rhythm and the politics that go with it, moving instead to a concept of measure that is deracinated, post-Euclidean and post-modern in all but name.
The implied politics of different physiological discourses concurrent with and influencing modernist poetry are discussed too by Bruce Clarke in Dora Marsden and Early Modernism: Gender, Individualism, Science (1996) and by Tim Armstrong in Modernism, Technology, and the Body (1998). Clarke’s primary material is Marsden’s journalism, but his closing chapter (1996, 173–217) is a demonstration of how the nexus of ideas that underpins her work – including vitalism and sexology alongside anarchism, feminism and sexual liberation – is refracted in Williams’s collection Spring and All (1923). Armstrong’s revealing study of bodily science and medical technology in modernist culture includes in its sweep prosthesis, electric shocks, excrement, automatic writing, hermaphroditism, sex changes and the Steinach operation (a vasectomy) to restore sexual vigour. Armstrong too is alert to the ideological underpinnings of medical theory and practice. Like Whitworth, he takes in poetry alongside prose. His chosen poets are either acutely aware of these ideologies – Mina Loy critiquing the gendered body (Armstrong, 1998, 111–20) – or embody their contradictions themselves – Yeats advocating eugenics while undergoing the Steinach operation to reinvigorate his own masculinity (135–58).
The ongoing tradition of scholarship on science in modernist poetry is largely consistent in its methods and concerns, and the picture it gives us has remained mostly coherent while becoming ever fuller and more detailed. The alternative critical tradition, on how science has shaped responses to nature in modern poetry, has so far been more divergent, both in its approaches and in its findings. The two full-length studies of Frost and science, for example – Robert Faggen’s Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin (1997) and Robert Bernard Hass’s Going by Contraries: Robert Frost’s Conflict with Science (2002), which includes a chapter of Darwin but also takes in astronomy, physics and other sciences – reach diametrically opposing conclusions on Frost’s attitude to science. For Faggen, Frost allies himself with a Darwinian empiricism even as he registers the bleakness of the Darwinian worldview in the dark ironies of his poetry. Faggen’s Frost is not unlike Richards’s Hardy. For Hass, by contrast, Frost increasingly takes refuge from Darwin in ideas derived from Henri Bergson and William James, seeing science as inextricably bound up with the metaphors of which it is constructed. Far from being a Darwinian, Haas’s Frost is a proto-post-modern relativist. The two Frosts stand marshalled on opposite sides of the so-called ‘science wars’ that were being waged as they were being constructed.
Other critics in this tradition are more explicit than either Faggen or Hass in their insistence on the relevance of current science to how and why we read modern poetry, and of modern poetry to how we understand our place in the world revealed by science. John Elder, John Barnie and I have all argued that we need to accommodate ourselves to the natural world revealed by modern biology, and that we can learn to do so through the accommodations reached by poets in their poetry. In Imagining the Earth: Poetry and the Vision of Nature (1985), Elder identifies a tradition of American nature poetry, originating with Jeffers and exemplified by Snyder, Ammons and Robert Pack, which he suggests enacts a return to a Wordsworthian poetics by grounding its understanding of science in Whitehead’s Romantic reaction on the one hand and in ecology on the other. In No Hiding Place: Essays on the New Nature and Poetry (1996), Barnie sees Darwinism as showing the insignificance of human beings in relation to life at large and to the universe beyond it. He traces the recognition of this state of affairs in the poems of Jeffers, Hughes, Ammons and Thomas, the science fiction epic Aniara by the Swedish poet Harry Martinson (1956) and the songs of the bluesman Robert Johnson. In Darwin’s Bards (2009), I argue that the existential implications of Darwinism – over the belief in God, the finality of death, our place in nature, and our relationships to each other and other animals – have remained much the same since the first publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859, and that poetry can play a unique role in helping us to grasp, tolerate and explore our Darwinian condition. Like Elder, I home in on a particular tradition within modern poetry, in this case running from George Meredith and Hardy, through Frost, Jeffers and Millay, to Hughes and Thom Gunn, Ammons and Clampitt, Pack and Rogers.
III
This book brings the recent flourishing of interrelations between poetry and science together with the two previously distinct traditions of academic criticism on science in modern poetry. In Part I, leading critics and poets take soundings of particular aspects of the relationship between science and contemporary poetry. Part II concentrates on science and modernism, Part III on responses by four major modern poets to Darwin and Darwinian ideas. The book is a collection of essays based on current research, not a critical companion, so it does not aim to give a representative or comprehensive picture of the subject beyond that sketched out here in the Introduction. What it does do is embody current trends in research on science and modern poetry. In the process, it offers various models for how these lines of inquiry may be pursued further. These new directions, each of which recurs in several different essays, include: an emphasis on the function of scientific language in poetry; a bringing together of the two largely distinct concerns with science and modernism on the one hand and poetry and biology on the other; close attention to science in the work of the British modernist poets, previously eclipsed by the alternative traditions of transatlantic modernism, led by Pound, Yeats and Eliot, and American modernism, led by Williams, Stevens and Moore; and a recognition of the continued importance of Darwin and Darwinian discourses and themes in modern rather than solely in Victorian poetry.
As this book is a collection of current research, scientists, disciplines and poets who loomed large in earlier studies do not necessarily feature in detail here. Einstein and physics, dominant in the 1980s and 1990s, have been supplanted by Darwin and biology. Williams, Stevens and Frost are largely absent, although Hardy, Yeats and Pound remain. This is not of course to say that the research on these absent topics and poets has been completed or superseded, only that the priorities of research have for now moved on, expanding the field in the process. Some of these new priorities are a reflection of wider cultural and intellectual fashions. What with the sequencing of the human genome, a growing awareness of the political as well as conceptual importance of ecology and biodiversity, and controversies over intelligent design, evolutionary psychology and genetic modification, biology has for now largely supplanted physics within the popular imagination as the most exciting and contentious of the sciences. Darwin’s role as a rallying post for secular culture in the face of religious fundamentalisms, culminating in the worldwide celebrations of his bicentenary in 2009, has ensured his position as the scientist with the highest public profile in the early twenty-first century. Other features of this book reflect its geographical origins. The emphasis on British over American modernism in these essays surely follows from the research having been conducted in Britain, and for the most part by British scholars. On the other hand, this scholarship expands our understanding of science in modernist poetry into a new area, the examples drawn from British modernism provide templates for approaching transatlantic and American modernism afresh, and the collection as a whole is anything but parochial, with discussions of Irish, Scottish, European and Australian as well as English and American poets – fittingly, given the global reach of both science and the English language in the modern age.
Part I focuses on the fertile interrelationship between poetry and science in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Rather than attempting a synoptic account of such a complex cultural phenomenon, each of the four authors writing in this section concentrates on a specific point of intersection within it. In Chapter 1, ‘The Function of Antagonism: Miroslav Holub and Roald Hoffmann’, Helen Small looks at the poetry of two leading scientists. Taking as her starting point the two essays by Holub included in Brown’s The Measured Word and Crawford’s Contemporary Poetry and Contemporary Science, Small works through the logic of his increasingly scornful critique of the value of poetry as against science in contemporary culture, at the same time interrogating his assumptions and his conclusions about the weakness of the humanities at large. Holub’s primary concern in these essays is with the question of how poetry can and should respond to science, a concern Small takes forward with a reading of poems by Holub himself and by the Nobel-Prize-winning chemist Roald Hoffmann.
In Chapter 2, ‘Cutting and Pasting: Language Writing and Molecular Biology’, Peter Middleton develops further a line of thought that he has been exploring in several recent essays, including his contribution to Coleman’s On Literature and Science (Middleton, 2007; see also Middleton, 2005, 2009). Examining the claims made for the ‘new sentence’ by Ron Silliman in the 1970s, and how these claims shape the practice of poets such as Lyn Hejinian in the 1980s and 1990s, he homes in on contemporary developments in genetics as both an important source and a crucial analogue for their poetics. In so doing, he picks up on a number of the questions raised by Small in the previous chapter, over the cultural authority of science, the relationship between different forms of knowledge, the function of scientific language within poetry, and the possibility of homologies of method between science and poetry – all themes which run throughout this book.
Chapters 3 and 4 differ from the other chapters in this book in being written by critics who are themselves distinguished poets. In Chapter 3, ‘The Poetics of Consilience: Edward O. Wilson and A. R. Ammons’, the Welsh poet John Barnie sets Wilson’s Consilience (1998) and Ammons’s Garbage (1993) – two influential and provocative books, the first by a scientist, the second by a poet – alongside one another to suggest a previously unconsidered parallel between them. Where the literary Darwinist critics claim that Wilson’s vision of the unity of knowledge reaching out from the sciences to encompass the humanities offers a method for literary criticism (see for example Carroll, 2004; Gottschall, 2008), Barnie draws on his own experience of writing poetry to argue instead that poetry in general and Ammons’s poem in particular are especially well suited to capture the immense range of the scientific vision championed by Wilson and the dense web of interconnections between its diverse objects.
In Chapter 4, ‘Poetry, Science and the Contemporary University’, the Scottish poet and academic Robert Crawford draws on his own experience too in an examination of how the institutional context of the contemporary university – and its associated research requirements and funding structures, based very substantially on the model of the sciences – bears upon the many poets today whose writing is sustained by day jobs teaching literature and creative writing. Crawford’s main case study is his own project on contemporary poetry and contemporary science, funded by the Wellcome Trust and Arts Council England. This project both participated in and in part evaded the university context as it brought scientists and poets into dialogue with one another. On this basis, Crawford concludes that there is scope for new kinds of interaction between the two disciplines aside from those considered by Holub in the essays analysed in the first chapter by Small – engagements facilitated but not prescribed or constrained by universities and funding councils.
In considering the relationship between the poet, science and academia, Crawford observes that while poets from MacDiarmid to Greenlaw to Kathleen Jamie have incorporated scientific vocabulary into their poetry, their manner of doing so has become less studiedly academic the more closely involved with academia itself they have become. In the first chapter of Part II – Chapter 5, ‘“Strange Synthetic Perfumes”: Investigating Scientific Diction in Twentieth-Century Poetry’ – Michael Whitworth picks up directly on Crawford’s analysis as he probes further the function of scientific language in modern and particularly modernist poetry. As well as raising the question of what counts as scientific language in the first place, and contextualising his discussion within debates on the topic of science in poetry from the turn of the century to the 1930s, Whitworth proposes five questions which can help to illuminate any critical reading of a modern poem engaging with science. What does the scientific terminology allow the poet to do or to say that would not have otherwise been possible in the poem? How far does the poem present science as changeable or, conversely, as the unchanging truth? What bearing does the poet’s use of a dramatic, personal or impersonal voice have on the presentation of scientific ideas? Does the poem foreground science as a kind of writing, or does it rather concentrate on scientific ideas themselves? Finally, how and to what extent is science combined with other forms of knowledge, and how far is a hierarchy of knowledges imposed upon them?
Although the questions Whitworth raises are pertinent to the study of science and modern poetry in general, he takes his examples largely from British modernist poets, including MacDiarmid, Empson, Michael Roberts and J. H. Prynne. The same is true of Chapter 6, ‘The Human Animal: Biological Tropes in Interwar Poetry’, by Tim Armstrong. In his discussion of the Language Poets in Chapter 2, Middleton traces the aesthetic of an influential school of ‘second wave modernists’ (Middleton, 2009, 956) to developments not in physics nor in physiology but in biology. In his essay, Armstrong develops a similar line of inquiry to set out what is in effect an entire field for new research: the significance of the wider biological sciences within modernist poetry. Concentrating on English poets of the 1920s and 1930s, including Auden, Empson, Roberts, Herbert Read and John Rodker, he homes in on endocrinology, entomology and evolutionary biology (with particular reference to the concept of neoteny) as the key biological disciplines which shaped the imagination of poets between the wars.
The other two chapters in Part II begin a series of case studies of prominent modern poets which makes up the second half of this book. In Chapter 7, ‘William Empson, Ants and Aliens’, Katy Price scrupulously teases out and pursues the engagements with popular entomology found within Empson’s poetry by Armstrong in the previous chapter. At the same time, like Armstrong, Price opens up a whole new avenue for criticism of modernism and science, by setting science fiction alongside popular science writing as a shaping influence on poetry, as she uncovers traces of H. G. Wells’s scientific romances in Empson’s early sonnet ‘The Ants’ and his later essay ‘Donne the Space Man’ – elements reworked by Empson to articulate his own counter-vision of the space race and of humanity’s place in the universe.
In Chapter 8, ‘Ezra Pound and the Materiality of the Fourth Dimension’, Ian Bell returns the reader to the more familiar if no less forbidding territory of transatlantic modernism, even as he returns himself to the question of the scientific sources for Pound’s poetics which he first addressed in Critic as Scientist. Here, working outward from brief allusions to the fourth dimension in The Cantos and in Pound’s letters, Bell traces a complex web of influences on Pound’s concept of Vorticism, ranging from non-Euclidean geometry to psychical research. In Critic as Scientist Bell largely confined himself to Pound’s poetics. Here his precise analysis of these sources enables in turn subtle and suggestive new readings of iconic poems, from The Cantos themselves and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley to ‘In a Station of the Metro’ and H.D.’s ‘Oread’.
The essays in Part III continue the turn towards biology in criticism on modern poetry and science exemplified by Middleton’s and Armstrong’s essays in the previous parts. Stephen Jay Gould remarked that ‘The Origin of Species exceeds all other scientific “classics” of past centuries in immediate and continued relevance to the basic theoretical formulations and debates of current practitioners’ (2002, 58). Notwithstanding the partial eclipse of Darwinian evolutionism, with its emphasis on natural selection, by competing models of evolutionary biology in the early twentieth century, since the 1860s Darwin and Darwinism have never been absent from debates over the nature of humankind and of nature itself. The last four essays in this book form a series of case studies, each focusing on a single poet – two men, two women, one Irish, one English, one American and one Australian. Between them they suggest the range and diversity of engagements with Darwin and his legacy in modern poetry.
In Chapter 9, ‘“Accidental Variations”: Darwinian Traces in Yeats’s Poetry’, Rónán McDonald extends the consideration of biology within modernist poetry by putting forward a complex account of Yeats’s relationship with Darwin and Darwinism. McDonald argues that Yeats’s early interest in scientific naturalism, his late advocacy of eugenics and a persistent strain of Darwinian natural history throughout his poetry combine to indicate a deep ambivalence rather than a simple antagonism in his attitude to Darwin. Where McDonald brings a poet who is not generally considered as engaging with Darwin into his orbit, Andrew Radford looks at the Darwinism of the most famously Darwinian of all modern poets from a new angle. In Chapter 10, ‘Making the Past Wake: Anthropological “Survivals” in Hardy’s Poetry’, Radford traces a line of influence from Darwin through the pioneering anthropologist E. B. Tylor which informs Hardy’s poetry of archaeological remains, ranging from Roman sites to the ancestral artefacts and spaces of a disappearing rural world. Far from leaving Hardy’s poetry nostalgic and stale, Radford argues, these survivals (in Tylor’s coinage) animate the poetry even as it reanimates them.
The last two chapters give precise accounts of how an interest in evolution shaped the poetry of two postwar poets in very different ways. In Chapter 11, ‘Reading Bishop Reading Darwin’, Jonathan Ellis takes as his starting point Elizabeth Bishop’s well known enthusiasm for Darwin as a writer. Ellis traces echoes of Darwin’s prose in Bishop’s poetry and discerns a kinship of outlook and even literary character between the two. For Bishop, Darwin’s writings, particularly The Voyage of the Beagle, and the attitude they encapsulate were of more significance than his theories themselves. Wright, on the other hand, left no evidence of a direct response to Darwin as a writer, but was increasingly alert to the implications of Darwinian biology, in particular ecology. In Chapter 12, ‘From Bergson to Darwin: Evolutionary Biology in the Poetry of Judith Wright’, I trace the impression of Bergson’s vitalist model of evolution on her early poetry. Wright’s was the dominant voice in Australian poetry from the 1940s to the early 1970s, while from the 1960s on she was one of her country’s most determined campaigners for aboriginal rights and against environmental destruction. In an age of persistent, even desperate, ecological crisis, driven by exploitation, her poetry has a worldwide currency and power. Like Bishop’s reading of Darwin, Wright’s vitalism is widely recognised by scholars of her poetry, but Bergson’s influence has not been traced in detail before. Nor have Wright’s profound doubts over Bergson, expressed in the self-same poems, been recognised. As early as the mid-1950s, I suggest, Wright had come close to jettisoning Bergson altogether, turning instead to a more Darwinian understanding of biology, in which extinction is an ever-present possibility and what matters is organisms themselves and the ecosystems in which they survive, not the imagined teleology of an élan vital.
Between them, the essays in this collection set out several new directions for the study of science in modern poetry. They propose new and detailed approaches for examining the function of scientific language within poetry, as well as the function of poetry in engaging with science. They advance the biological turn in scholarship in the field, taking in modernist poets usually ignored by critics in this tradition, and revealing a multitude of different relations between modern poetry and distinct biological disciplines, from anthropology to endocrinology, from Darwin’s use of language to the ‘language’ of the genome. They propose new cultural contexts for thinking about modern poetry, from diverse scientific models of knowledge to popular science fiction. They turn a reflective and critical eye on current dialogues between scientists and poets, and between science and poetry in the work of recent poet-scientists, and they open up new seams in the history of modern poetry and science for further exploration, including Australian poetry, Language Writing and the poetry of the British modernists between the wars.
I began this Introduction with Robert Bridges, a poet not discussed elsewhere in this book. Bruce Clarke begins the Afterword which closes the book with another such poet: D. H. Lawrence. For Clarke, recent scholarship revealing Lawrence’s sophisticated and perceptive engagement with science is a reminder of the extent to which literature and science criticism acts to undermine our preconceptions, both about individual poets and about poetry per se. Neither poetry nor science is monolithic, and the two do not stand in opposition to one another as two alien cultures. As Clarke suggests, the essays in this book remind us how porous and expansive the definitions and boundaries of ‘science’ are, how the work of scientists is embedded in and helps to form the culture of their moment, and how a grasp of the place of science in that culture and of the scientific ideas and intertexts with which modern poets have engaged can enrich immensely our understanding of their work. Through opening up the ways in which these poems engage with science, these essays perform too what Clarke calls a ‘cosmopolitan gesture’, one that reaches out not only to readers interested in poetry for poetry’s sake, but also to those who recognise that science is a defining component of modern culture, and that poetry that speaks through science or about it is speaking to us all.