American Poetry and Science in the Cold War

This is a study of the response of American poetry of the modernist tradition to the cultural dominance of the natural sciences during the period 1950-1990.
I. A. Richards believed that 'the future of poetry is immense,' but as he wrote in the nineteen-thirties, 'a more representative modern view would be that the future of poetry is nil,' and he could see why: 'in its use of words most poetry is the reverse of science.' This was an acute dilemma for American poets who inherited from Stein, Pound and Williams a largely unexamined conviction that the central value of poetry as an art depended on its capacity to inquire into all areas of human life. How was it possible to go on believing this and to develop new poetic forms commensurate with the developments of the modern sciences, if their society believed that science was not only the best but the only method of establishing truth and creating knowledge, and that poetry was its reverse? The importance of science was visible everywhere. During the Cold War, research in the natural sciences was heavily subsidised by US government defence spending, and from at least 1950-1970 this was concentrated in nuclear physics. Most of the poets read the leading science journal for non-specialist readers, Scientific American, whose very title implied that to be scientific was a patriotic aspiration, and which displayed the triumphal progress of sciences by explaining the mysteries of life and the material world and encroaching on issues previously thought to be matters of ethics and imagination such as 'why negroes riot' or poverty in the cities.
The book traces two successive leading literary movements, New American Poetry and Language Poetry, and investigates the degree to which transition from one to the other in the early 1970s resulted from changes in the public culture of the sciences. Particle physics was the most prestigious science during the period of New American Poetry; poets such as Baraka, Olson, Duncan, and Levertov all struggled with its cultural authority. When molecular biology replaced physics as the most influential science in American culture during the 1970s, it made a strong impression on poets because the new biology of DNA employed many linguistic metaphors to represent biochemical genetic processes. The book will study poetic experiments by Language Poets that appear to emulate the work of geneticists decoding what they called the 'language of life.'
There are no full-length studies of the science and poetry of this period. With a few exceptions critics concentrate on the poetic use of metaphors and images taken directly from scientific discourse, such as relativity or black holes. This approach sidesteps the question of what sort of knowledge and authority these terms have in poetic rhetoric. Insights from excellent research on high modernism cannot be directed applied to the postwar period because the character of science changed radically, as theories largely ceased to be the work of one charismatic individual, and models of matter and the organism became increasingly complex and ever further beyond sensory understanding.
This study therefore centres on the concept of inquiry. Postwar modernist poets shared a commitment to intellectual inquiry in their poetry, whether they were investigating self, world, language or society, and they explored possible convergences with the role of research and inquiry in the sciences. The book will consider by close reading of poems and writings on poetics, to what extent these texts were sounding the possibilities of imaginative inquiry in a scientific culture, and contextualise them by contrasting varying roles of imagination and rhetoric in scientific discourse. The book as a whole will shed light on the impact of the natural sciences on contemporary culture, and on ways in which poetry and science can collaborateor complement one another.