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 nature’s 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 book’s chapters show how poets and science writers relied on a set of shared terms (“form,” “experiment,” “rhythm,” “sound,” “measure”) and how the meaning of those terms was debated and reimagined in a range of different texts. “A 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 ‘the processes of the universe’ were themselves ‘rhythmic,’ 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. ‘The motion of waves,’ Tate demonstrates, was ‘the exemplary form in the physical sciences.’ Sound waves, light, energy, and poetic meter were each characterized by a ‘process of undulation,’ 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 patterning that characterizes the undulatory as (in John Herschel’s words) not ‘things, but forms.’” —Anna Henchman, Associate Professor of English at Boston University, USA “This 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.” —Daniel Brown, Professor of English at the University of Southampton, UK “Essential reading for Victorianists. Tate’s 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. The undulatory rhythms of the universe and of poetry, the language of science and of verse, come into new relations. 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.” — Isobel Armstrong, Emeritus Professor of English at Birkbeck, University of London, UK

The first study of poetry by Victorian scientists, a unique record of the nature and cultures of Victorian science.

The Victorians were obsessed with the empirical but were frequently frustrated by the sizeable gaps in their understanding of the world around them. This study examines how literature and popular culture adopted the emerging language of physics to explain the unknown or ‘imponderable’.

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "The Poetry of Science; or, Studies of the Physical Phenomena of Nature" by Robert Hunt. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

Discussing the idea of space in the first half of the 19th century, this book uses contemporary poetry, essays, and fiction as well as scientific papers, textbooks, and journalism to give an account of 19th-century literature's relationship with science.