Overview
- Offers a wide-ranging assessment of how perceptions of poetry, science, and materialism changed over the course of the long nineteenth-century
- Looks at how debates about the relation between poetry and the physical sciences were constructed and communicated through the linguistic and formal details of nineteenth-century writing
- Aims to question established narratives of intellectual specialisation in nineteenth-century Britain by arguing that poetry and science became more closely aligned as the century progressed
Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine (PLSM)
Access this book
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Other ways to access
Table of contents (7 chapters)
Keywords
About this book
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 natureâs 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 bookâs chapters show how poets and science writers relied on a set of shared terms (âform,â âexperiment,â ârhythm,â âsound,â âmeasureâ) and how the meaning of those terms was debated and reimagined in a range of different texts.
âA stimulating analysis of nineteenth-century poetry and physics. In this groundbreaking
study, Tate turns to sound to tease out fascinating continuities across
scientific inquiry and verse. Reflecting that âthe processes of the universeâ were
themselves ârhythmic,â he shows that a wide range of poets and scientists were
thinking through undulatory motion as a space where the material and the immaterial
met. âThe motion of waves,â Tate demonstrates, was âthe exemplary form in
the physical sciences.â Sound waves, light, energy, and poetic meter were each
characterized by a âprocess of undulation,â that could be understood as both a
physical and a formal property. Drawing on work in new materialism and new
formalism, Tate illuminates a nineteenth-century preoccupation with dynamic patterningthat characterizes the undulatory as (in John Herschelâs words) not âthings,
but forms.ââ
âAnna Henchman, Associate Professor of English at Boston University, USA
âThis impressive study consolidates and considerably advances the field of physics
and poetry studies. Moving easily and authoritatively between canonical and scientist
poets, Nineteenth-Century Poetry and the Physical Sciences draws scientific
thought and poetic form into telling relation, disclosing how they were understood
variously across the nineteenth century as both comparable and competing
ways of knowing the physical world. Clearly written and beautifully structured,
Nineteenth-Century Poetry and the Physical Sciences is both scholarly and accessible,
a fascinating and indispensable contribution to its field.â
âDaniel Brown, Professor of English at the University of Southampton, UK
âEssential reading for Victorianists. Tateâs study of nineteenth-century poetry and
science reconfi gures debate by insisting on the equivalence of accounts of
empirical fact and speculative theory rather than their antagonism. Theundulatory rhythms of the universe and of poetry, the language of science and of
verse, come into newrelations. Tate brilliantly re-reads Coleridge, Tennyson,
Mathilde Blind and Hardy through their explorations of matter and ontological
reality. He also addresses contemporary theory from Latour to Jane Bennett.â
â Isobel Armstrong, Emeritus Professor of English at Birkbeck, University of London, UK
Reviews
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Gregory Tate is a lecturer in Victorian literature at the University of St Andrews, and the author of The Poetâs Mind: The Psychology of Victorian Poetry 1830-1870 (2012).
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and the Physical Sciences
Book Subtitle: Poetical Matter
Authors: Gregory Tate
Series Title: Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31441-5
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-31440-8Published: 18 June 2020
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-31443-9Published: 26 August 2021
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-31441-5Published: 17 June 2020
Series ISSN: 2634-6435
Series E-ISSN: 2634-6443
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XI, 271
Topics: Nineteenth-Century Literature, Poetry and Poetics, British and Irish Literature, History of Science, Popular Science in Literature