Content area
Full Text
Quantum Poetics Daniel Albright. Quantum Poetics: Yeats, Pound, Eliot and the Science of Modernism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. x + 307 pp. $59.95
ANYONE TURNING to Quantum Poetics: Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and the Science of Modernism in search of sustained comparisons between quantum theory and modernist poetry will be disappointed. Unlike some scholars in the social studies of science, Albright makes no claims that there are common cultural forces that act on both art and science: "The fact that actual scientists also [like poets] found themselves in exasperating positions when trying to explain the real world according to a particle model or a wave model is only a nice analogy, not a proof of some profound congruence between science and art." What Albright proposes in Quantum Poetics is an influence study, an investigation of the "the appropriation of scientific metaphors by poets." Albright argues that "the methods of physicists helped to inspire poets to search for the elementary particles of which poems were constructed-poememes, one might call them" and that this search for the poememe leads to a sort of literary uncertainty relation: "the more narrowly the Modernists tried to isolate the poememe, the more elusive it became."
Such research into the influence of science on poetry has produced fruitful scholarship in the past, from Marjorie Hope Nicholson's classic study Newton Demands the Muse (1946) to Lisa Steinman's more recent Made in America: Science, Technology, and American Modernist Poets (1987), in which Steinman documents the ways in which Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams validated their work by borrowing from science. There has not yet been a study which details the borrowings of modernist poets from quantum theory. The project Albright proposes is a timely one. It is not one, however, that he carries out in this book. Except for a few references to Einstein and relativity theory in the introductory chapter, Albright makes scant reference to physics-or to any other branch of modern science, for that matter. His only reference to Niels Bohr comes from a passage in Katherine Hayles's Chaos Bound; his only comments on Erwin Schrödinger are based on John Gribbin's popular science text In Search of Schrodinger's Cat.
In fact, Albright pays far...