KEATS hated science, complaining that it âwould clip an angelâs wingsâ, and that Newton had âdestroyed the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to a prismâ. The poet wouldnât be impressed with todayâs poetry and science love-in. For years, big-name poets like Ruth Padel, Lavinia Greenlaw and Alice Fulton have drawn on scientific ideas. Now the rise of neuroscience, in particular, seems to be attracting a new generation.
This makes sense: poetry spends a lot of time dancing around âthe hard problemâ of how the physical stimuli we are exposed to end up as the subjective experience researchers call qualia. In this respect, poetry speaks to the same urgency to know what makes us tick as neuroscience does.
Helen Mort, whose first collection was shortlisted for a number of awards, says that âpoetry is particularly well placed â perhaps even uniquely placed â to represent some of these experiential aspects of qualia. The poet Michael Donaghy described a poem as a âdiagram of consciousnessâ⊠Thatâs a great way of putting it.â
Advertisement
Poets can also help articulate the big questions about our universe and ourselves, Mort suggests. âThe more we find out about the world, the more questions we uncover,â she says.
What Keats worried about, of course, was that science would unpick the beauty of the natural world. If we came to know all about how it works, where is the space for poetry to fill?
But the reverse is true, argued Richard Dawkins in his 1998 book Unweaving the Rainbow: scientific discoveries just give us more to wonder at. Perhaps instead of ruining the illusion, science and poetry can feed off one another and act as a shortcut to the truth?
âPoetry and science both seek to peer through to the underlying reality of things, pushing at the borders of imagination,â agrees Sarah Howe. Her debut collection Loop of Jade has just won one of poetryâs most famous awards, the T. S. Eliot prize.
âScience and poetry can feed off one another and act as a shortcut to the truthâ
Another route to the heart of that reality was taken by Litmus, a magazine for poems about science, in its âhaematological issueâ last year. Packed with stark, elliptical poems on blood, the body and the limits of medical science, its experimental poems frequently used complex scientific language.
Poetry can also tell us why we should care: the âresponsibility to aweâ, as poet-astronomer Rebecca Elson put it. This is something Simon Barraclough taps into with his Sunspots poems, with which he has toured the UK in his one-man show. It has Barraclough both embodying our nearest star and providing a commentary on what it has meant to us throughout history.
The relationship between poetry and science is not one way, either: scientists can benefit from grappling with new metaphors to communicate their work. For example, Barracloughâs latest collection Laboratorio is the fruit of a stint as poet-in-residence at the UKâs Mullard Space Science Laboratory, where he teased poems out of many of the researchers.
These collaborations hint at a more fundamental alliance, in terms not only of shared interests but also methods. Thatâs something poet Michael McKimm, who has done fieldwork with geologists, has noticed, too. As he explains: â51¶ŻÂțs have to have great imagination, and are very creative in a practical way.â
Howe worked alongside the biggest name of all in 2015 when she collaborated with Stephen Hawking to create a about relativity, which he read for the UKâs National Poetry Day. It begins:
When we wake up brushed by panic in the dark
our pupils grope for the shape of things we know.
Photons loosed from slits like greyhounds at the track
reveal lightâs doubleness in their cast shadows
that stripe a dimmed labâs wall â particles no more â
and with a wave bid all certainties goodbye.
During their collaboration, Hawking told Howe: âPhysicists and poets may differ in discipline, but both seek to communicate the beauty of the world around us.â
Dawkins would agree. As he wrote in Unweaving the Rainbow: âScience is poetic, ought to be poetic, has much to learn from poets and should press good poetic imagery and metaphor into its inspirational service.â
This article appeared in print under the headline âThe power of verseâ
