The development of the story of Challenging the Divide: Approaches to Science and Poetry Since we are faced with an intended National Curriculum, currently dealing with K – 10 and soon to deal with senior school requirements, and since it appears that the subjects are likely to be ‘silos’ with limited interaction between them, and since a Principal has already praised the changes as being ‘deep not wide’, it is time to state clearly that subjects, or areas of study, can be, and need to be, both deep and wide. Scientific aspects of life need to be coming across all subject areas. Robyn Williams explains why in Future Perfect: What next? And other impossible questions, published by Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, NSW. In Chapter 2 he gives give reasons for its necessity. Here I concentrate on why he says it must be studied in schools. Science must be studied in schools because it is essential to life. . . Every job of the 21st century needs some science. Judges and lawyers have to know about DNA and forensic evidence, farmers must understand genetics and chemicals, cooks must be au fait with nutrition, Salmonella and botulinum, business people need to know about IT, and architects about energy and water. Teachers need psychology, sex workers prophylactics, sportspeople pharmaceuticals, stockbrokers bio-investments, cleaners recycling, carpenters forestry, fishers ichthyology (before fish all die out) and beauticians health care. And everyone needs to know about the environment. Or else! (pp 44-45) And, as Laureate Professor Peter Doherty makes clear, this cannot happen in isolation. And I would add that poets have their part to play in this whole process. This website is not simply repeating material from Challenging the Divide but expanding its scope in order further to extend students’ horizons. The inclusion of essays by the contributors to the book will depend upon them giving permission for their essays to become part of this website. At this stage we can only refer to the book where Laureate Professor Peter C. Doherty makes clear his belief that, ‘Given the complexity of the modern world, and the fact that many people will be involved in a diversity of activities throughout their lives, the more we can give our young people a solid acquaintance with both the sciences and the humanities the better our society will be.’ Much of the story of the teaching experiences that brought this book about, from 1966 onwards, is in the Introduction to the book. I had been working with women and men in the University of the Third Age since 2002 gathering information and sharing ideas with them exploring connections between the sciences and poetry. As a poet I was a member of the Poets’ Union and received ‘Five Bells’ their quarterly journal. In one edition I read an article arguing the case for teaching more contemporary Australian poetry in schools. While I agreed with much that Walter Wynne wrote, I thought it was time to present an argument for a broader approach to poetry in English classes, an approach that was willing to engage in a cross-curricular way with the sciences.
I discussed my ideas with Dr Michael Deves of Lythrum Press who published my book, A Broader Vision: Voices in Vocational Education from 1897 – 2001 in South Australia. It was time to do more than just talk about the interdisciplinary aspects of learning in our schools. This article for teachers and poets was the first step. The essay Poetry and Science in Education: A response to Accessing Australian Poetry: What Schools Need by Warrick Wynne, Five Bells, Summer 2005 was accepted for Five Bells: poetry of the sea, Volume 12 No 3, Winter 2005. I answered his concern with the suggestion in this article. Excerpts from Poetry
and Science in Education A response to Accessing Australian Poetry: What Schools Need by Warrick Wynne in ‘Five Bells’ Summer 2005. ‘I agree with much that Warrick Wynne has suggested in his article. In particular I agree with his statement that ‘English classrooms must cater for a great deal of individual difference, mixed abilities and attitudes, from students who are passionate about the subject to those who wouldn’t be there if they didn’t have to be.’ His article concentrates upon the situation within the syllabus for English teachers. Rightly he says that ‘poetry tells us things we didn’t know we knew and things we never knew . . .’ His focus is on students within the English classes. Why not broaden that focus, in a society where interdisciplinary and cross-curricular connections are needed, to teachers and students in other subjects? Why not encourage collaboration between teachers across the curriculum? Why not bring the creative and interpretive power of poetry to other subjects? Science, rather the range of sciences, is a case in point. It is still possible to go to a library and ask a librarian for work connecting poetry and science only to be corrected and told, ‘You mean poetry or science.’ ‘No I don’t. I mean poetry and science. Better still, poetry and the sciences and scientists.’ In 2005, in some aspects of our cultural life, we are removing barriers. That supposed ‘chasm’ between the sciences and the arts and humanities that C.P. Snow insisted existed in The Two Cultures is not a chasm: it is not a geological separation unable to be bridged. It is a man-made division, like the Cartesian separation of mind and body, that has lasted much too long to the detriment of the understanding of both. In the Middle Ages, there were three aspects of
philosophy, metaphysical, moral and natural. During the Renaissance, when da
Vinci was writing about the visual arts, he placed poetry in the realm of moral
philosophy. In Leonardo
the Scientist, Anna Maria Brizio recognised that Leonardo did consider there was a difference between poetry and art/science. Poetry belonged to the realm of moral philosophy while the realm of the artist/engineer was natural philosophy.
Leonardo’s reaction to those who might despise him because he was not ‘a man of
letters’ is in this translation from the Atlanticus document 119 v-a (p 133) ‘Since I am not a man of letters, I know that certain presumptuous persons will feel justified censuring me, alleging I am ignorant of writing — fools! They do not know that I could reply, as Marius to the Roman nobles, ‘They who adorn themselves with the labors of others will not concede me my own.’ They will hold that because of my lack of literary training I cannot properly set forth the subjects I wish to treat. They do not know that my subjects require for their expression not the words of others but experience, the mistress of all who write well. I have taken her for my mistress And will not cease to state it.’
However, Anna Maria Brizio insisted that ‘in this changeable musical rhythm that binds and exalts Leonardo’s phrasing in its better moments we can recognize the lyrical component of his temperament.’ (p 115) [As an aside. In contemporary society, where ‘vocational’ tends to be reserved for those considered unable to cope with ‘academic’ work, in ‘Leonardo’s writings’ by Augusto Marinoni, included in Leonardo the Scientist, published by Hutchinson, London, 1981, Marinoni wrote of Leonardo, ‘Even if he does not succeed in formulating with precision and applying the correct rules of experimental method, he has clearly realized and affirmed that science could not progress without taking over the method of the mechanical arts which were looked down upon. Manual work, once reserved for slaves, and direct contact with material, considered an obstacle to the purity of ideal contemplation, are now fully redeemed as necessary elements for the attainment of scientific truth.’ (p 127)] Anna Maria Brizio wrote, in ‘The words of Leonardo’ ‘There is no antagonism in Leonardo’s mind between art and science. They flow perpetually from one another, each increasing by experience of the other.’ (p 127) He wrote at one time: ‘Love only makes me
remember, it alone makes me alert.’ (p 127) . . . Leonardo’s assertions precede the discoveries of the seventeenth century and, while he separates poetry from the visual arts and the sciences, that does not appear to happen in seventeenth century English poetry. What is exciting in the work of English poets in the seventeenth century when scientific ferment was at its height — particularly in the discussions of the atomist theory which saw atoms as the foundations of life — is the connection between the sciences and poetry. There was delight in the possibilities as well as awareness of moral considerations. There is no room here to consider ways in which poets brought images from scientific ideas into their poems. However, consider this 1653 poem by Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, wife of a Cavalier aristocrat exiled and living in Paris, after England became a Commonwealth, where Descartes was expounding his Cogito ergo sum ['I think, therefore I am' or 'Je pense donc je suis'] approach to human existence. Of Many Worlds in This World Just like unto a Nest of Boxes round, Degrees of size within each Boxe are found, So in this World, may many Worlds more be, Thinner, or lesse, and lesse still by degree; Although they are not subject to our Sense, A World may be no bigger then two-pence. Nature is curious, and such worke may make, That our dull Sense can never find, but scape. For Creatures, small as Atomes, may be there, If every Atome a Creatures Figure beare. If four Atomes a World can make, then see, What severall Worlds might in an Eare-ring bee. For Millions of these Atomes may bee in The Head of one small, little, single Pin. And if thus small, then Ladies well may weare A World of Worlds, as Pendents in each Eare. Margaret Cavendish, initially refused permission to visit
the Royal Society set up by Charles II for the
advancement of science because she was a woman, is an ancestor of Henry
Cavendish, one of England’s great scientists, for whom the Cavendish laboratory at Cambridge
was named. Physicists have now discovered so much about the sub-atomic world that her exploration of this playful possibility is well and truly out of date but it remains a delightful demonstration of a connection being made between poetry and science in the seventeenth century. ‘Jarring atoms’ found their way into Dryden's poem, ‘A Song for St Cecelia's Day, 1687’ which celebrates the ultimate power of music to ‘untune the sky’ From Harmony, from heav'nly Harmony This universal Frame began. When Nature underneath a heap Of jarring Atomes lay, And cou'd not heave her Head, The tuneful Voice was heard from high, Arise ye more than dead.
The Augustan poets of the eighteenth century saw no reason to separate themselves from the sciences. The sense of wonder and pride in Newton’s discoveries in optics is in the work of James Thomson. In ‘To the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton’ he is exuberant in his praise. In France Voltaire gave Newton the status of the interpreter of God’s design in ‘A Madame La Marquise du Chatelet sur la Philosophie de Newton (1736). Many people know Alexander Pope’s superlative heroic couplet in his honour. ‘Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night, God said, ‘Let Newton be’ and All was light.’
In his article ‘Uses of Science in English Poetry: Historical and thematic approaches’ John Cartwright, (Chester College of Higher Education p 4) says that in the eighteenth century, ‘Science had pushed poetry into a form and content from which it later struggled to break free.’ So many changes in approaches occurred in the nineteenth century, ranging from William Blake’s concerns about the impact on society of the Newtonian mechanistic view of the universe, Shelley’s admiration for the possibilities of science, Matthew Arnold’s fears in ‘Dover Beach’, when religion was being challenged by scientific discoveries, of ‘. .ignorant armies that clash by night’ or Tennyson’s fears, expressed in ‘Locksley Hall Sixty Years After’. Here, in the latter part of the Victorian Age, Tennyson brought moral considerations into, what T.S. Eliot called, Tennyson’s ‘ruminations’.
‘Is it well that while we range with Science, glorying in the Time, City children soak and blacken soul and sense in city slime?
There among the glooming alleys Progress halts on palsied feet, Crime and hunger cast our maidens by the thousands on the street.
Yonder lies our young sea-village - Art and Grace are less and less: Science grows and Beauty dwindles - roofs of slated hideousness!
"Poor old Heraldry, poor old History, poor old Poetry, passing hence, In the common deluge drowning old political common sense!’
For Tennyson, science was producing the industrialised, laissez-faire, frightening Bounderby-dominated society to which Charles Dickens drew attention in Hard Times. This business of the separation of the sciences (for Dickens the separation of ‘facts’ from ‘feelings’ and the ‘imagination’) from the humanities and the arts had a serious effect on the structure of curriculum in secondary schools in the twentieth century. The background to that separation appears to have been connected to the undermining of Convention (IV) , respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land and its Annex signed at The Hague, 18th October 1907. Article 23 (b) prohibited the use of poison or poison gas. In Hitler’s Scientists John Cornwell considers the work of Dr Fritz Haber. His approach to scientific responsibility is cited as an example of the ‘depersonalisation’ of science. Cornwell sees his actions as an exemplar of the ‘notion that science is value-free, neutral and apolitical.’ [p 47]. The German government broke the Hague Convention when it permitted Dr Fritz Haber, one of the greatest scientists of the early twentieth century, to use the toxic liquid chlorine he had developed against their enemies on the Western Front in a cloud of gas. Haber insisted that ‘science was value-free, neutral, apolitical: the scientist discovered the laws of nature and invented applications; the good and evil perpetrated by those applications was on the consciences of others.’ [ibid p47] This convenient move towards the ‘depersonalisation’ of science and scientists came at a time when discoveries in science, and particularly in chemistry, were transforming the world, most importantly warfare. Is it a coincidence that T.S.Eliot, in his essay, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ called for the depersonalisation of art, ‘the continual extinction of personality’ at a time when this scientific attitude was so powerful in Europe? This significant essay was published in 1919. In it Eliot wrote: ‘It is in this depersonalisation that art may be said to approach the condition of science.’ For Eliot, in the same essay, the role of the ‘transforming catalyst’ was central. For Eliot the mind of the poet, like the shred of platinum in the experiment, remains ‘inert, neutral and unchanged’. [‘Traditional and Individual Talent’ p 18]. ‘When the two gases previously mentioned [oxygen and sulphur dioxide] are mixed in the presence of a filament of platinum, they form sulphurous acid. This combination takes place only if the platinum is present; nevertheless the newly formed acid contains no trace of platinum, and the platinum itself is apparently unaffected: has remained inert, neutral and unchanged. The mind of the poet is the shred of platinum.’ I have chosen this
example to emphasize the significance of science in the thinking of one of the
twentieth century’s most influential poets. We do want works of art to stand on
their own. All poems by poets who are anonymous must do so. However, they do
exist in time and space and are works of human imagination, subject to human
attitudes, as are the sciences. My knowledge
of twentieth century literary criticism is limited but the challenge to that
idea of the innocence and neutral nature of the human catalyst came from a
Nobel-prize winning chemist and poet, Roald Hoffmann.
I first came across him through ‘Poetica’ on Radio National. In the last few Mike Ladd's 'Poetica' has been celebrating National Science Week by looking at the relationship between poetry and science. On Saturday 16th August 2003 he pointed to the ‘crossover’ between the two disciplines ‘Poets, like scientists, are curious about the make up of the world and have the same desire to get behind surface appearances to the meaning of things.’ In his essay ‘The Chemist’ in ‘Chemistry Imagined’, Roald Hoffmann writes: ‘Chemistry
is the science of molecules . . . so many molecules are made by us, in the
laboratory. . . . The synthesis of molecules puts chemistry very close to the
arts. We create the objects that we or others then study or appreciate. That’s
exactly what writers, composers, visual artists, all working within their
areas, working perhaps closer to the soul, do. I believe that, in fact, the
creative capacity is exceptionally strong in chemistry. Mathematicians also
study the objects of their own construction, but those objects, not to take
anything away from their uniqueness, are mental concepts rather than real
structures. Some branches of engineering are actually closer to chemistry in
this matter of synthesis. Perhaps this is a factor in the kinship the
chemist-narrator feels for the builder Faussone, who is the main character in Primo Levi’s novel The
Monkey’s Wrench.’(pp 68 – 71) It is significant that he mentions Primo Levi, an Italian industrial chemist, survivor of the Holocaust and a poet, some of whose poems appear in translation in Scanning the Century: The Penguin Book of the Twentieth Century in Poetry edited by Peter Forbes. The collection enables the reader to explore a very wide range of poems, including selections under the headings of ‘New Things Under the Sun: Science and Technology’ and ‘By the Light of Orion: Sci-Fi and Space’. Among them is Gwen Harwood’s poem ‘Schrödinger’s Cat Preaches to the Mice’ and a poem by the Nobel-prize winning Polish poet, Wislawa Szymborska that makes a soaring connection between π and Shelley’s skylark. In that 2003 programme, Poetica included stanzas from Roald Hoffmann’s poem on his fellow Nobel-prize-winning chemist, Fritz Haber. In the poem Hoffmann took up the issue of the catalyst. He realised the catalyst is not innocent. ‘ . . . . . . . . . ‘Geheimrat Haber of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute thought himself a catalyst for ending the War; his chemical weapons would bring victory in the trenches; burns and lung cankers were better than a dum-dum bullet, shrapnel. When his men unscrewed the chlorine tank caps and green gas spilled
over the dawn field at Ypres he carefully took
notes, forgot his wife’s sad letters.’ In a review of Chemistry Imagined Richard Jerome says ‘In spirited bursts of text Hoffmann – best known for applying quantum mechanics to the study of chemical reactions - filters his field through the soul of a poet, skirting deftly what he calls the “deadening jargon” of science. Here he weeps for Marie Curie, in the space of a page he leaps from Blake to Nils Bohr, or from the music of Elliott Carter to a molecule of haemoglobin.’ There is a fascinating and imaginative connection between poetry and science at the South Australian Museum. An exhibit of a giant squid needs three or four flights in an empty lift well to allow its tentacles to fall their full length. If one walks up the stairs around the lift well, one follows the stanzas of Tennyson’s poem, ‘The Kraken Wakes’. In the annual Waterhouse Art Exhibition of visual interpretations of aspects of natural history, held at the SA Museum, one will find some artists speaking of the poetry in the aspect of natural history they are interpreting. Recently I found a collection of poems by Tony Page, Gateway to the Sphinx, published by Five Island Press. My knowledge of science is limited to Leaving Botany, which I found enthralling but failed because our teacher ignored the chemistry, a compulsory part of the course. My interest in the connections between poetry and science began in England when I had to prepare a group, mainly boys, for the Cambridge entrance examinations in comprehension. I experienced the negative, male attitude to anything not scientific or technological that appeared to justify what C. P. Snow called “the chasm”. As Deputy Principal (Curriculum) at Marion High School I worked to foster interdisciplinary connections. I was fortunate to be able to work with a number of teachers who saw the value for students of cross-curricular explorations. However the segregation of the ‘harder’ sciences from ‘the softer’ subjects was deep-seated, supported as it was by attitudes in academia that I became aware of when I became a member of the Flinders University governing council. However, the climate of opinion is changing. Tony Page’s poems are exhilarating. I would encourage all teachers of English and the Sciences to read and share with some of those science students, especially reluctant ones, his poem ‘Tutorial with Flowers and Light’. The sense of wonder, the magnitude of distance and time come together as he writes ‘Feel it, Twelve billion years before their radiance comes to rest on my flowers. their rays, exhausted, surrender energy to the petals in this room’ ‘Feel it’, he says. And I do. That essential connection for learning of thought and feeling is in his work. Move on to ‘The Library of Life’ and the connection between DNA and ‘Life’s scriptorium’ ‘Coiling this helix in endless cunning array, DNA squeezes the contents of 230,000 books into the honeycomb of every human cell’. Taste the sweetness of it. As one who has been fascinated by, but ignorant of, so much about what is happening in the sciences, I have found here an avenue to adventure and understanding. It does not mean that we should not be challenging the applications of science. Roald Hoffmann insists on the connection between the sciences and ethics. It does not mean that we should not be asking questions, as Roger McGough does in ‘Science, where are you?’ But it is a ‘gateway’ and Tony Page offers a mind-expanding and heartening journey among treasures in the spheres of astronomy, evolution, chemistry, physics and the ‘big bang’. His work and that of Philip Nolan [was] included in Poetica’s programme for National Science Week. Philip Nolan’s collection of poems, Teach yourself Atomic Physics, [was due] to be launched. It [was] published by Combustible Books. Here are alternative avenues for budding poets, for the study of the craft, the expression of their own thoughts and feelings and the expansion of their education References Carlo Zammattio, Augusto Marinoni and Anna Maria Brizio, Leonardo the Scientist, Hutchinson, London, 1981. John Cornwell, Hitler’s Scientists Viking, London, 2003. T.S.Eliot Selected Essays, Faber and Faber, London, first published 1932, reprinted 1969 Roald Hoffmann and Vivian Torrence, Chemistry Imagined: Reflections on Science, Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington and London, 1993 This work contains his prose essays as a chemist seeking to be understood by everyone who reads it, poems that are whimsical and frightening, ‘Giving Up (pp 133 – 134), and collages by Vivian Torrence. Hoffmann believes in the connections of the sciences, humanities and the arts. In ‘Natural Cycles’ he writes, ‘Our lives are improved by detergents and synthetic fibers, and by the social web of human, constructed support. Our lives are enriched by Mozart and Bob Marley and the Wailers, bringing to us a world of synthesized, transformed beauty and satisfaction.’ (p 151) It is so enjoyable to find a chemist who begins an essay on ‘Chinese Elements’ with reference to the witches’ brew in the fourth act of ‘Macbeth’. (p 100) Peter Forbes (Ed), Scanning the Century: The Penguin Book of the Twentieth Century in Poetry, Penguin Books, 2000 Roald Hoffmann, Memory Effects – Poems by Roald Hoffmann, Calhoun Press, Columbia College, Chicago, 1999. Tony Page, Gateway to the Sphinx, Five Island Press, Wollongong University, NSW 2004 John Cartwright ‘Uses of Science in English Poetry: Historical and thematic approaches’ Chester College of Higher Education, 2000 http://www.bshs.org.uk/conf/2000science comm/papers/cartw.doc [Wordsworth expected, in the introduction to Lyrical Ballads that: ‘The remotest discoveries of the chemist, the botanist, or mineralogist, will be as proper objects of the poets’ art as any upon which it can be employed.’ Read Tony Page’s poem which builds upon Wordworth’s poem ‘Lines Composed Above Tintern Abbey’.] Roger McGough, In the Glassroom, Jonathan Cape, London, 1976, reprinted 1990.
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