Autorentext

Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980) was a poet, playwright, biographer, children's book author, and political activist. She won the Yale Younger Poets Prize for her first collection, Theory of Flight (1935), and became central to both American modernism and Leftist political communities over her five-decade career, mentoring scores of younger poets including Alice Walker, Anne Sexton, Sharon Olds, and Adrienne Rich, among many others. Rukeyser was born in New York City and attended Vassar College. After her death in 1980, Rukeyser's work suffered critical and popular neglect. However, Rukeyser's body of work has emerged as particularly vital and important to poets and scholars in the first decades of the 21st century.

Klappentext

Marginalian Editions presents a groundbreaking poet's biography of the forgotten scientist who founded physical chemistry, shaping much of the 20th century-and an ingenious, expansive treatise on American creativity, character, and remembrance.

Josiah Willard Gibbs (1839-1903) was an American visionary whose work shaped a century of science by bridging classical mechanics and quantum physics. A kindly and shy bachelor who lectured at Yale in relative obscurity for more than thirty years, he single-handedly created the field of physical chemistry without ever completing a single experiment. Gibbs's visionary work enabled future scientists to predict what states a substance can assume and under what conditions-the implications for industry, agriculture, and warfare were vast. Hailed by Einstein as "the greatest mind in American history," Gibbs remained essentially unknown.

To acclaimed poet Muriel Rukeyser, Gibbs "lived closer than any inventor, any poet, any scientific worker in pure imagination to the life of the inventive and organizing spirit in America." Rukeyser's thoroughly researched and lyrical tribute to Gibbs is much more than a biography: it is an alchemical compound of philosophy, history, ethics, and literature writ large. It is the story of a country, a century, a global epoch of scientific creativity that would color every realm of human imagination and aspiration, from poetry to politics.

Inhalt

Foreword by Maria Popova

1. Introduction: On Presumption

2. The "Amistad" Mutiny

3. New Haven Childhood

4. Science and the Imagination

5. The Education

6. Father and Son

7. The Civil War

8. The Years Abroad

9. Return to America

10. The First Papers

11. A Chair in Mathematical Physics

12. The Great Paper

13. "Mathematics Is a Language"

14. The Rosetta Stone of Science

15. The Shadow and the Factory

16. Three Masters: Melville, Whitman, Gibbs

17. The Imagination of America

18. The Double Democracy

19. Tendencies of History

20. The Long Discovery of Willard Gibbs

*Acknowledgments Five Definitions

Reading List

Sources of Quotations

Index

About the Author and Introducer*