Nineteenth-Century Poetry and the Physical Sciences

Poetical Matter examines the two-way exchange of language and methods between nineteenth-century poetry and the physical sciences. The book argues that poets such as William Wordsworth, Mathilde Blind, and Thomas Hardy identified poetry as an experimental investigation of nature's materiality. It also explores how science writers such as Humphry Davy, Mary Somerville, and John Tyndall used poetry to formulate their theories, to bestow cultural legitimacy on the emerging disciplines of chemistry and physics, and to communicate technical knowledge to non-specialist audiences. The book's chapters show how poets and science writers relied on a set of shared terms ("form," "experiment," "rhythm," "sound," "measure") and how the meaning of those terms was debated and reimagined in a range of different texts.

Autorentext

Gregory Tate is a lecturer in Victorian literature at the University of St Andrews, and the author of The Poet's Mind: The Psychology of Victorian Poetry 1830-1870 (2012).

Klappentext

Poetical Matter examines the two-way exchange of language and methods between nineteenth-century poetry and the physical sciences. The book argues that poets such as William Wordsworth, Mathilde Blind, and Thomas Hardy identified poetry as an experimental investigation of nature's materiality. It also explores how science writers such as Humphry Davy, Mary Somerville, and John Tyndall used poetry to formulate their theories, to bestow cultural legitimacy on the emerging disciplines of chemistry and physics, and to communicate technical knowledge to non-specialist audiences. The book's chapters show how poets and science writers relied on a set of shared terms (form, experiment, rhythm, sound, measure) and how the meaning of those terms was debated and reimagined in a range of different texts.

Inhalt

1. Introduction2. Wordsworth, Humphry Davy, and the Forms of Nature3. Quotation and the Rhetoric of Experiment4. Words and Things in the Periodical Press5. Tennyson's Sounds6. Mathilde Blind: Rhythm, Energy, and Revolution7. Hardy's Measures.