John Holmes, editor
Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012
Over the last thirty years, more and more
critics and scholars have come to recognize the importance of science to
literature. Science in Modern Poetry: New
Directions is the first collection of essays to focus specifically on what
poets in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have made of the scientific
developments going on around them. In a collection of twelve essays, leading
experts on modern poetry and on literature and science explore how poets have
used scientific language in their poems, how poetry can offer new perspectives
on science, and how the ‘Two Cultures’ can and have come together in the work
of poets from Britain and Ireland, America and Australia.
What does the poetry of a leading
immunologist and a Nobel-Prize-winning chemist tell us about how poetry can
engage with science? Scientific experiments aim to yield knowledge, but what do
the linguistic and formal experiments of contemporary American poets suggest
about knowledge in their turn? How can universities help to bring these
different experimental cultures and practices together? What questions do
literary critics need to ask themselves when looking at poems that respond to science?
How did developments in biology between the wars shape modernist poetry? What
did William Empson make of science fiction, Ezra Pound of the fourth dimension,
Thomas Hardy of anthropology? How did modern poets from W. B. Yeats to
Elizabeth Bishop and Judith Wright respond to the legacy of Charles Darwin?
This book aims to answer these questions and more, in the process setting out
the state of the field and suggesting new directions and approaches for
research by students and scholars working on the fertile relationship between
science and poetry today.
‘This
collection genuinely offers new directions for the study of science in modern
poetry. It is coherently organised, full of matter, often fascinating, and
always thought-provoking.’
Gillian Beer, University of Cambridge
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