John Tyndall (1822–1893) is best known as a leading natural philosopher and trenchant public intellectual of the Victorian age. He discovered the physical basis of the greenhouse effect, explained why the sky is blue, and spoke and wrote controversially on the relationship between science and religion. Few people were aware that he also wrote poetry. The Poetry of John Tyndall contains his 76 extant poems, the majority of which have not been transcribed or published before, and are succinctly annotated in a style similar to that used for the letters published in The Correspondence of John Tyndall.The poems are complemented by an extended introduction, which was written by the three editors together as a multidisciplinary analysis. The essay aims to facilitate readings by a range of people interested in the history of Victorian science and of Victorian science and literature. It explores what the poems can tell us about Tyndall’s self-fashioning, his values and beliefs, and the role of poetry for him and his circle. More broadly, the essay addresses the relationship between the scientific and poetic imaginations, and wider questions of the nature and purpose of poetry in relation to science and religion in the nineteenth century.

"John Tyndall was a leading scientific figure in Victorian Britain, who established the physical basis of the greenhouse effect, and why the sky is blue. This rich biography describes the colourful life and achievements of this brilliant communicator, physicist, and mountaineer, who ascended from humble beginnings to the heart of Victorian society."--

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 329 letters in this volume represent a period of immense transition in John Tyndall's life. A noticeable spike in his extant correspondence during the early 1850s is linked to his expanding international network, growing reputation as a leading scientific figure in Britain and abroad, and his employment at the Royal Institution. By December 1854, Tyndall had firmly established himself as a significant man of science, complete with an influential position at the center of the British scientific establishment. Tyndall's letters throughout the period covered by this volume provide great insight into how he navigated a complicated course that led him into the upper echelons of the Victorian scientific world. And yet, while Tyndall was no longer as anxious about his scientific future as he was in previous volumes of his correspondence, these letters show a man struggling to come to terms with his newfound status, a struggle that was often reflected in his obsession with maintaining an "inflexible integrity" that guided his actions and deeds.

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