This article was taken from the April 2012 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
https://www.wired.co.uk/topic/amazonEdgar Allen Poe called science a "Vulture, whose wings are dull realities";
Keats complained that the discipline would "unweave a rainbow".
Modern poetry is more forgiving, though. John Holmes, a senior lecturer in English at the University of Reading and editor of
Science in Modern Poetry: New Directions (Liverpool University Press), shows how the two cultures are closer than you think. "There once was a mag called wired..."
Byzantium by WB Yeats
A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains/All that man is/All mere complexities/The fury and the mire of human veins
"Yeats's view of nature was pretty Darwinian, even if he didn't like it. this quote shows the juxtaposition of a pure ideal, represented by art and the heavens, with the knowledge that human nature is complex, murky and driven to survive."
Canto 49 by Ezra Pound
The fourth; the dimension of stillness/And the power over wild beasts
"Early 20th-century theorists were trying to understand the idea of 4D space, of which the three dimensions we can see and touch form the surface. it raised the possibility of a space beyond space, in which things might vanish beyond the limits of our observation. this is what pound is thinking of here."
Relativity by DH Lawrence I like relativity and quantum theories/because I don't understand them/and they make me feel as if space shifted about like a swan that can't settle/refusing to sit still and be measured
"Lawrence has got to the nub of it, in that quantum theories do make space immeasurable. he likes this modern science because, unlike Victorian materialism, it is paradoxical."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
