I like the modern poet russe E. Efimovskiy

He interest of the construction of little herbaceous plant and

He question many ingeneniers of big construction and boats:

Efimovskiy

Ракета и травинка

Прошу мне ответить без всякой заминки: Ракета сложней или проще травинки? Вы скажете сразу: ракета сложнее Она и важнее, она и нужнее. Она состоит из мильона деталей, Ее миллион человек собирали. Тогда вам услышать, быть может, в новинку, Что сделать нельзя полевую травинку. Верней для травинки найдутся детали, Но вы соберете травинку едва ли. Вам даже не сделать пустяшной соринки, Кусочка от этой зеленой травинки. Выходит травинка сложней, чем ракета. Как просто все это. Как сложно все это.

Rocket and blade of grass

I ask to answer without any hitch: Is a rocket harder or a blade of grass? You will say right away: the rocket is more complicated It is more important, it is more necessary. It consists of a zillion parts, Her million people collected. Then you hear, perhaps, as a novelty, What can not be done a blade of grass. Really for a blade of grass there are details But you collect a blade of grass hardly. You do not even make a trifling mote, A piece of this green blade of grass. A blade of grass is more complicated than a rocket. How simple it all is. How complicated is all this.

Fusée et brin d'herbe

Je demande à répondre sans accroc: Une fusée est-elle plus dure ou un brin d'herbe? Vous allez dire tout de suite: la fusée est plus compliquée C'est plus important, c'est plus nécessaire. Il se compose d'un zillion de pièces, Son million de personnes recueillies. Ensuite, vous entendez peut-être, comme une nouveauté, Que ne peut pas faire un brin d'herbe. Vraiment pour un brin d'herbe il y a des détails Mais vous ramassez un brin d'herbe à peine. Vous ne faites même pas un petit mot, Un morceau de ce brin d'herbe verte. Un brin d'herbe est plus compliqué qu'une fusée. Comme tout est simple. Comme c'est compliqué tout ça.

Arthur Rimbaud had a very great influence with science, suggesting using colors for letters, a great improvement the poet may not have foreseen, but it helped so much in classification and quick recognition. That's one of the main contribution of poetry to science, and totally under-recognized, as if letters were colored since the very beginning of Humanity, as an evidence when it was thanks to poetry.

Dear Muthana Makki Mohammedali

I could provide quite a few names (specially in French, and Spanish language literature) if you precise the context (both linguistic and epochal). For the moment, here are some references to start with:

Signs and Humours: The Poetry of Medicine. Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. 2007.

The Poet as a Botanist. Cambridge University Press. 2008.

Literature and Chemistry: Elective Affinities. Aarhus University Press. 2014. 

Douglas Livingstone

Thank you, everyone!

Walt Whitman's poetic prose is an early ecosystems sciences tribute... https://www.bartleby.com/229/1112.html his poetry too... https://whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/1891/poems/27

e.g. Alrusafi and Alzahaui

#Yousif Eskandar, this is interesting for a comparative perspective, Thanks!

Though they didn't have science as the subject matter, writers of the Transcendentalist school and Nature poets like Wordsworth are accepted as pioneers of ecocritical literature.

Hi. More than poets who wrote about science I can suggest poets who utilise the scientific method writing poems. The OuLiPo, Ouvroir de litterature potentielle is a french group born from writers and mathematics. "Cent mille milliard de poemes" from Raymond Queneau its an interesting exemple. Nanni Balestrini is an italian who write using electronic calculator. If this advice is useful I can suggest something more.

Emiliano! How interesting!

Thanks!

William Blake provided a critique of Newton's rationalist views, which he sees underlying the industrialism that victimizes his chimney sweeping boys. And Wordsworth was also critical of rationalism, with his emphasis on poetic synthesis vs. the newer tendency by which "we murder to dissect."

Here are a few URLs that may prove useful:

• http://www.magicdragon.com/UltimateSF/sfpo-2pt1.html
• http://web.mit.edu/redingtn/www/netadv/SPpoetry.html
• https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/dec/09/ruth-padel-science-poetry
• https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/poetry/2016/06/love-affair-between-science-and-poetry

PS. Do you mean "modern" in the sense of "beginning with The Enlightenment", or do you just mean "in recent times"? (Some of the above websites cover both.)

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_history#Modern

Thanks, Karl! I was thinking of post I World War poetry. Your list is very interesting, though. Cheers

I agree that Walt Whitman addresses science in his poetry. In his poem "Passage to India" (notably) he explicitly deals with the "globalist" implications of three technological signs of progress--the Suez Canal, the Transatlantic Cable, and the transcontinental (U.S.) railroad. These are engineering feats resulting from science, but he is, like many writers before him, fascinated by the "electrical" as a metaphor for the linkage of the physical and the spiritual.

THE HORRID VOICE OF SCIENCE

'There's machinery in the butterfly;

There's a mainspring to the bee;

There's hydraulics to a daisy,

And contraptions to a tree.

'If we could see the birdie

That makes the chirping sound

With x-ray, scientific eyes,

We could see the wheels go round.'

And I hope all men

Who think like this

Will soon lie

Underground.

Vachel Lindsay

--------------------------------

Posted just to be ornery. :)

Jim Drummond I guess Vachel Lindsay had himself in mind, since he committed suicide with a chemical product developed by science. Or maybe he was just being ornery. 😈

Since I learned that decades ago, I have always thought swallowing Lysol would be about the worst way to self-destruct other than a nerve agent or U.S. lethal injection. Lindsay might have been bipolar, as he varied from ecstasy to agony quite often in his life.

Thanks, Jim!

I wonder if Lindsay's poetry reflects such mood swings similar to what can be detected in Emily Dickinson's.

I think that Dickinson's mood swings stay within a fairly narrow bandwidth. How Happy is the Little Stone is considered one of her more light-hearted poems, and yet is underlain with a kind of weariness, still yearning to escape from life as with Joe's lament in Porgy and Bess-- "tired of livin' but feared of dyin'." [Oddly, from a literary perspective, she died of "Bright's Disease."]

Read Lindsay's The Congo -- or Machinery (the latter is specially anti-science as well) and I think Lindsay's exuberance of rhythm and Luddite pessimism are mixed together as if oil and water were a sublime compound rather than a mundane solution.

MACHINERY. OH, EGYPT QUEEN OF EGYPT WHEN I WAS KING OF BIRDS YOU CALLED ME FROM THE TREETOPS WITH MYSTIC COPTIC WORDS. YOU WHISTLED AND YOU WHISPERED, THEN MOCKED ME, FICKLE QUEEN. YOU SAID TO ALL MY SOUL TALK, "A BIRD IS A MACHINE." YOUR TRIBE WAS OLD IN SCIENCE-, YOU SAID TO ME "YOUR WINGS ABE RODS AND STRINGS AND HINGES ; THE PLACE IN YOU THAT SINGS. "IS A TINY WILLOW WHISTLE, QUITE WELL DEVISED, BUT STILL A SISTRUM MAKES MORE MUSIC:

A FEATHER'S BUT A QUILL; "A CLAW IS BUT A NEEDLE: A CRAW, A MILL FOR CORN; YOUR HEART IS BUT A LITTLE PUMP, YOUR SOUL WAS NEVER BORN." BUT THEN, I SANG SO DESPERATELY .... I MADE FAIR EGYPT SIGH: "OH DOWNY SOUL IMMORTAL! OH BIRD THAT CANNOT DIE!"

And science shows that Lindsay's anti-science was actually good science-- bees have moods, can "discuss" past experiences, and have complex neurons and synapses- attributes of fairly advanced consciousness. See this link for a great article from Aeon;

https://aeon.co/essays/inside-the-mind-of-a-bee-is-a-hive-of-sensory-activity?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=2fb34d427c-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_12_05_01_16&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-2fb34d427c-70579905

The following links could be very useful for you:

Benedek, Mathias, Roger Beaty, Emanuel Jauk, Karl Koschutnig, Andreas Fink, Paul J. Silvia, Beate Dunst, & Aljoscha C. Neubauer. «Creating metaphors: The neural basis of figurative language production», en Neuroimage 90 (4/15). 2014: 99-106.

Changeux, Jean-Pierre. Du vrai, du beau, du bien. Une nouvelle approche neuronale. Odile Jacob. 2010.

_____ (Ed.). La lumière au siècle des lumières & aujourd’hui. Art et Science. Odile Jacob. 2005.

Collot, Michel. La Pensée-paysage : philosophie, arts, littérature. Actes Sud/ENSP. 2011.

Damasio, Antonio. Looking for Spinoza. Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain. Harvest. 2003.

_____. L’Erreur de Descartes : la raison des émotions. Odile Jacob. 2006

Desrochers, Jean-Simon. Processus agora. Approche bioculturelle des théories de la création littéraire. Éditions Les Herbes Rouges. 2015.

Dortier, Jean-François (Ed.). Le cerveau et la pensée : Le nouvel âge des sciences cognitives. Éditions Sciences Humaines. 2011.

Dufrenne, Mikel. Phénoménologie de l’expérience esthétique. PUF. 2011

Feldman, Jerome. From Molecule to Metaphor: A Neural Theory of Language. MIT Press. 2006.

Fontanille, Jacques. Sémiotique et littérature : essais de méthode. PUF. 1999.

Freeman, Margaret H. «The Aesthetics of Human Experience: Minding, Metaphor, and Icon in Poetic Expression», en Poetics Today Vol. 32, Nº 4. 2011: 717-752.

_____. «The Poem as Complex Blend: Conceptual Mappings of Metaphor in Sylvia Plath’s ‘the Applicant’», en Language and Literature Vol. 14, Nº 1. 2005: 25-44.

Hallyn, Fernand. Les structures rhétoriques de la science : de Kepler à Maxwell. Seuil. 2004.

Jacobs, Arthur M. «Neurocognitive poetics: methods and models for investigating the neuronal and cognitive-affective bases of literature reception», en Frontiers in Human Neuroscience Vol. 9. 2015.

Lakoff, George. “The Neural Theory of Metaphor”, en The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought. Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr. (Ed.). Cambridge University Press. 2008: 17-38.

Louâpre, Muriel & Hugues Marchal. «Introduction», en La Poésie scientifique, de la gloire au déclin. Muriel Louâpre, Hugues Marchal & Michel Pierssens (Eds.). Épistémocritique. 2014: 5‐18.

Pierssens, Michel. Savoirs à l’œuvre. Essais d’épistémocritique. Presses Universitaires de Lille. 1990

Stockwell, Peter. Cognitive poetics: An Introduction. Routledge. 2002

The group of Spanish mutants -Agustín Fernández Mallo, Germán Sierra and others- are known for practising the kind of literature you are interested in, as well as the French Lorand Gaspar.

Regards!

Thanks, @ Francisca Noguerol.

I was recently lucky enough to stumble upon a novela-length book of poetry all centered around the mathematics idea of Infinite (I love working in a library). I could not put this down. It is hilarious and insightful to this science enthusiast and poet.

Title

Infinity : beyond the beyond the beyond / by Lillian R. Lieber ; edited and with a new foreword by Barry Mazur ; illustrations by Hugh Gray Lieber.

Author

Lillian R. Lieber (Lillian Rosanoff), 1886-1986.

Subjects

Infinite

Description

Infinity in the physical world -- Infinity in mathematics -- More about "potential" infinity -- Non-Euclidean geometries -- "Actual" infinity -- "Actual" infinity (cont.) -- A still greater "actual" infinity! -- The continuum of real numbers -- How To Go from No to c -- Operations on transfinites -- Higher dimensions -- A hierarchy of infinities! -- A brief summary -- Is it legitimate? -- Some very interesting infinite sets -- Applications: Zeno et al. -- Paradoxes -- Paradoxes in the theory of transfinites and how they have been conquered -- The moral.Originally published: New York : Rinehart, 1953.

Publisher

Philadelphia : Paul Dry Books

Creation Date

2007

Format

262 p. : ill. ; 21 cm..

Language

English

Identifier

ISBN : 9781589880368

ISBN : 1589880366

Thanks, Bobby.

I am hoping to find a poem I assembled decades sgo derived entirely frim the Clemson University course caralog segment of the graduate mathematics fepartment's program in computer concepts. If I find it I will add it to my works in progress. The advanced concepts have very vivid language.

Fred Romano- interesting post on colored letters per Rimbaud. Since early childhood both letters and numbers have appeared to me in persistent and consistent individual colors and shades. Seven Is fuchsia, eight is cobalt. I havee been scared to reveal this symptom of lunacy till now. :)

I follow the Good contribution

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Science in Modern Poetry

New Directions

• Holmes, John

Poetry &..., 4

March 31st, 2012

•   English Literature

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Description

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.

First collection of essays to focus specifically on what poets in the 20th and 21st centuries have made of the scientific developments going on around them. Contains essays from leading experts on modern poetry, literature and science. Suggests new directions and approaches for researchers working on the fertile relationship between science and poetry.

This collection of essays 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.

About The Author

John Holmes is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Reading, and the author of 'Darwin's Bards: British and American Poetry in the Age of Evolution' (Edinburgh University Press, 2009).

@Dmytro Leshchenko, Thank you!

Several poets have turned to the words and images of science to supply them with new metaphors as they struggle to understand nonscientific domains

Jim Drummond RE: If I find it I will add it to my works in progress. The advanced concepts have very vivid language.

Ha ha. Drummond's last poem. You should've just said "I have written a truly remarkable poem which this margin is too small to contain." 😍

Karl Pfeifer- I did not create that mathematics poem, but merely assembled phrases from the Clemson University mathematics program catalog. Whether remarkable or not, I did not write it as writing is usually defined. I did locate it in my papers and indeed it is long. I may upload it soon. Thanks for your comment alhough I am uncertain whether you are being a bit sarcastic or not. Ambiguity is the blood in the veins of life, right?

Jim Drummond For sarcasm I would've used this 👎, not this 😍. But now you've left me wondering whether you actually got my friendly joshing allusion to Fermat, since I've checked your profile and see you're a lawyer, not a mathematician .... ☮️

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermat%27s_Last_Theorem (see 2nd paragraph)

Whether science has formed the staple of a poem or not, it has provided a number of memorable metaphors to it, like when Eliot compares a poet's sensibility to a catalyst which quickens the poetic process without itself undergoing a change. Donne has used conceits borrowed from metallurgy and geometry.

Eliot's comparison of evening to a 'patient etherised upon a table' is also a medical metaphor very effectively conveying the inertia of modern man. Alchemy with its idea of transmutation has also given images to poetry.

I have written a dozen or so poems on various scientific topics related to the philosophy of science. Besides, I paint graphics as illustrations for these poems. I plan to write some more of these poems and publish a book of poems with these illustrations. Soon I will publish and then also post on the Research Gate portal.

Best regards,

Dariusz Prokopowicz

Lots of science here and there, but not (to my knowledge) in concentrated form in modern and post-modern poetry. Even someone like Frost, in his sonnet "Design" is thinking "science" when he refers to Newton's gravitational theory and the "Argument (for the existence of God) from Design" that evolved from it. Whitman in "Passage to India" preaches the gospel of technology as part of his exceptionalist view of "America." The line between science and technology is often blurred by most. Many early moderns struggled to see the automobile and airplane as fit ("too vulgar and low") subjects for poetry. Marinetti, the "Futurist" from Italy, preached the gospel of force, speed and, frankly, noise. Fascists loved him. And several postmodern "Language Poets" insist on poetry as being "noisy" rather than metrical and musical. They "break" language apart in order to create a new communication system and world order to their liking. I think they also fail to communicate., certainly to those who prefer their poetry to be (as Sandberg said) a nice mix of "hyacinths and biscuits."

Coincidentally, I have just had a collection of poetry published called "What Trees Know." One whole section of poems is titled "The Poetic Science of Trees."

Many relevant links here:

http://web.mit.edu/redingtn/www/netadv/SPpoetry.html

Karl Pfeifer , An awesome list! Thanks for sharing.

I propose to you to read for free all my poetry published on Researchgate. Many of my poems discuss Einstein and the photons Light.

Here is the link: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/362910305_Trente_Fleurs_Recueil_poetique

Thank you Prof. Akram Louiz .

Strange- my post yesterday and Prof. Freeman's no longer appear here, nor do I see Prof. Cureton. Que pasa?

Gretel Ehrlich and Annie Dillard, both American prose writers and poets.