The interdisciplinary study of literature and science aims at giving the lie to C. P. Snow’s charge that there is an unscientific, even anti-scientific, flavour to modern literary culture. The primary goal of ‘one culture’ criticism, as it is sometimes called, has been to overcome perceived antagonisms between the two fields, freeing up traffic in ideas, analysing creative connections and abrasions at the level of language. In the main, that means literary critics subjecting the writing of science, and writing about science, to literary analysis. It does not often mean scientists writing about literature. Current work in ‘literature and science’...

Exploration takes extra words

Words qua sentience and thinking

These are spread over a position – being long and pointed over

They anticipate an immoderate time and place

Reality moves around making objects appear as if they belong where they are

Then it shifts, say, up and down, with the sunlight’s yellow interstitial coloring matter

The sun here is an exceeding stricture

I’ve yet … I keep thinking … all open daylit areas carry to peripheries their yellow floating ovoid motes

Eggs go out of optical range, but only ellipsing

This particular attraction empties in

Blown convincing field, it rattles...

The exponential growth in knowledge during the past 100 years has been so great that it is easy to feel overwhelmed. In science, disciplines that appeared coherent two or three generations ago are divided and subdivided, and subdivided again, as researchers specialise in ever narrower yet immensely complex niches. Although reductionism in science is often viewed with suspicion in the humanities, something analogous has happened there as a result of the increased production, if not over-production, of research. A few years ago at a conference on Victorian literature, I struck up a conversation with a fellow delegate who introduced himself...

My last contact with the Irish-American poet Michael Donaghy occurred not long before his death in 2004. Donaghy agreed to take part in a project I was organising on ‘Contemporary Poetry and Contemporary Science’, and met Professor Kevin Warwick, a ‘cyborg researcher’ who had had a silicon chip transponder surgically implanted in his left arm. Michael was taken aback by all this, but gave as good as he got. Writing a poem in response to the experience of meeting this scientist, he entitled it ‘Grimoire’. A grimoire is a magician’s manual for invoking demons – hardly a familiar word nowadays....

In a well known passage, Mikhail Bakhtin wrote that ‘all words have the “taste” of a profession, a genre, a tendency, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a generation, an age group, the day and hour’ (1981, 293). Compared with the subtle social distinctions that Bakhtin alludes to, one might expect the flavour of scientific vocabulary to stand out very vividly; but verbal flavours lose their distinctiveness over time, and in any case, some poets like to exploit terms that are already polysemous and which belong to no single professional tongue. The investigation of scientific terms in poetry...

Michael Roberts’s ‘Earth, Impact’ (1936) has become something of an anchor point for those interested in relations between science and poetry in the 1930s. Alongside the poem’s engagement with physics and geology, there is the biological imaginary represented by these lines (ll. 13–20), in which language has the fine structure of organic life, and reading is a kind of parasitic investment in that life (‘Where commentary ivy clings/In deep interstices of mind’ (ll. 23–24)). These metaphors put into practice the aesthetics articulated in Roberts’s preface toNew Signatures(1932), which compared scientific and poetic knowledge and technique. An...

William Empson provocatively dubbed John Donne a ‘space man’ in his second major essay on the Renaissance poet, establishing science fiction credentials for a writer who, Empson maintained, was ‘interested in getting to another planet much as the kids are nowadays’ (1993a, 78). ‘Donne the Space Man’ appeared in John Crowe Ransom’sKenyon Reviewin the summer of 1957, a few months before the launch of Sputnik 1 on 4 October. Empson’s argument was that Donne ‘brought the idea [of space travel] into practically all his best love-poems, with the sentiment which it still carries of adventurous freedom’, and that...

Towardsthe end of The Fifth Decad of Cantos(1937), resting between the historical turbulence of Cantos 48 and 50, celebrating the tranquillity of ancient Chinese order and applauding the pleasure and relaxation of pre-industrial labour, Pound’s Canto 49 concludes on a note of particular quietude in its penultimate line: ‘The fourth; the dimension of stillness.’ A few years later, in a letter of June 1942 to Luigi Berti, we find a gloss on this quietude which remains one of only two open acknowledgements by Pound of the fourth dimension:

Stillness – the word is more concrete than IMMOTO [the...

There is surely no major poet less amenable to Darwinism than W. B. Yeats. His poetic philosophy is resolutely opposed to the scientific thinking and the arid materialism that he sees stifling modern thought. All students of Yeats quickly learn that the poet set his teeth against the ‘grey truth’ of science, targeted in the first of hisCollected Poems, ‘The Song of the Happy Shepherd’ (l. 4). Across his career, one finds him railing against materialism and its associated artistic forms of realism and naturalism. The ancient, visionary Ireland that Yeats valorises opposes ‘this filthy modern tide’, providing a...

In Thomas Hardy’s ‘Drinking Song’ the speaker decodes Charles Darwin’s ‘strange message’ with a uniquely complex blend of philosophical gravitas and darkly mischievous wit. What triggers this speaker’s sardonic dismay is the possibility of a lineage reified in ‘blood’: a mysterious bond between ‘apes and men’ that survives ‘dull defacing Time’ (‘In the Night She Came’, l. 11). The phantasmagoric, visionary and uncanny components of Hardy’s poetry, anchored in a radical repackaging of Darwin’s scientific bequest, owes a signal though not widely canvassed debt to a late-Victorian anthropologist with a keen interest in questions of biological inheritance and ancestral memory,...

Elizabeth Bishop is often celebrated as a poet’s poet. John Ashbery once called her the ‘writer’s writer’s writer’ (1977). Such descriptions imply that Bishop was somehow born to be a poet, but that being a poet was all she could do. In her lifetime Bishop frequently bridled at suggestions that she was aloof or ignorant of the problems of contemporary America, or indeed Brazil, where she lived for almost two decades. In an interview with Ashley Brown in 1966, she spoke of being ‘very aware of the Depression […]. After all, anybody who went to New York and rode the...

In September 1969 Judith Wright – by then well established as Australia’s leading poet, and soon to become equally celebrated as a resolute campaigner on behalf of its environment and indigenous peoples – gave a talk at a symposium in honour of the Nobel-Prize-winning Australian immunologist Macfarlane Burnet. Her title was ‘Science, Value and Meaning’. Beginning with C. P. Snow’s famous lecture on ‘The Two Cultures’, which had been published a decade earlier, Wright remarked that Snow had ‘over-simplified the problem’. ‘The real split’, she suggested, was ‘not […] so much between scientists and literary intellectuals as between two sides...