American Poetry and Science in the Cold War

这是对1950-1990年间美国现代主义传统诗歌对自然科学的文化统治的反应的研究。理查兹认为，诗歌的未来是广阔的，但正如他在20世纪30年代所写的那样，更具代表性的现代观点是，诗歌的未来是零，他明白了其中的原因：在文字的使用上，大多数诗歌是科学的相反。对于美国诗人来说，这是一个严重的两难境地，他们从斯坦、庞德和威廉姆斯那里继承了一个基本上未经检验的信念，即诗歌作为一种艺术的核心价值取决于它探索人类生活所有领域的能力。如果他们的社会相信科学不仅是最好的，而且是唯一确定真理和创造知识的方法，而诗歌正好相反，那么他们怎么可能继续相信这一点，并开发出与现代科学的发展相称的新的诗歌形式呢？科学的重要性随处可见。在冷战期间，自然科学的研究得到了美国政府国防开支的巨额补贴，至少在1950-1970年间，这些资金主要集中在核物理领域。大多数诗人都阅读了面向非专业读者的领先科学期刊《科学美国人》，该杂志的标题本身就暗示了成为科学是一种爱国愿望，并通过解释生活和物质世界的奥秘以及侵蚀以前被认为是伦理和想象力的问题来展示科学的胜利进步，比如城市中的黑人暴动或贫困。这本书追溯了连续两次领先的文学运动--新美国诗歌和语言诗歌，并调查了20世纪70年代初科学公共文化的变化在多大程度上导致了一种文学运动向另一种文学运动的转变。粒子物理学是新美国诗歌时期最负盛名的科学；巴拉卡、奥尔森、邓肯和列弗托夫等诗人都在与它的文化权威作斗争。当分子生物学在20世纪70年代取代物理学成为美国文化中最有影响力的科学时，它给诗人们留下了深刻的印象，因为新的DNA生物学使用了许多语言隐喻来代表生化遗传过程。这本书将研究语言诗人的诗歌实验，这些实验似乎模仿了遗传学家的工作，破译了他们所说的“生命语言”。没有对这一时期的科学和诗歌进行全面的研究。除了少数例外，批评者集中在直接取自科学话语的隐喻和图像的诗意使用上，例如相对论或黑洞。这种方法回避了这些术语在诗歌修辞中拥有什么样的知识和权威的问题。对高度现代主义的卓越研究的见解不能应用于战后时期，因为科学的性质发生了根本性的变化，因为理论在很大程度上不再是一个有魅力的个人的作品，物质和有机体的模型变得越来越复杂，远远超出了感官理解。因此，本研究以探究的概念为中心。战后现代主义诗人在他们的诗歌中分享了对智力探索的承诺，无论他们是在调查自我、世界、语言还是社会，他们都在探索可能的趋同，在科学中发挥研究和探究的作用。这本书将通过仔细阅读关于诗学的诗歌和著作来思考，这些文本在多大程度上探索了科学文化中想象力探索的可能性，并通过对比想象和修辞在科学话语中的不同角色来将它们联系起来。作为一个整体，这本书将阐明自然科学对当代文化的影响，以及诗歌和科学如何合作或相互补充。

This is a study of the response of American poetry of the modernist tradition to the cultural dominance of the natural sciences during the period 1950-1990. I. A. Richards believed that 'the future of poetry is immense,' but as he wrote in the nineteen-thirties, 'a more representative modern view would be that the future of poetry is nil,' and he could see why: 'in its use of words most poetry is the reverse of science.' This was an acute dilemma for American poets who inherited from Stein, Pound and Williams a largely unexamined conviction that the central value of poetry as an art depended on its capacity to inquire into all areas of human life. How was it possible to go on believing this and to develop new poetic forms commensurate with the developments of the modern sciences, if their society believed that science was not only the best but the only method of establishing truth and creating knowledge, and that poetry was its reverse? The importance of science was visible everywhere. During the Cold War, research in the natural sciences was heavily subsidised by US government defence spending, and from at least 1950-1970 this was concentrated in nuclear physics. Most of the poets read the leading science journal for non-specialist readers, Scientific American, whose very title implied that to be scientific was a patriotic aspiration, and which displayed the triumphal progress of sciences by explaining the mysteries of life and the material world and encroaching on issues previously thought to be matters of ethics and imagination such as 'why negroes riot' or poverty in the cities. The book traces two successive leading literary movements, New American Poetry and Language Poetry, and investigates the degree to which transition from one to the other in the early 1970s resulted from changes in the public culture of the sciences. Particle physics was the most prestigious science during the period of New American Poetry; poets such as Baraka, Olson, Duncan, and Levertov all struggled with its cultural authority. When molecular biology replaced physics as the most influential science in American culture during the 1970s, it made a strong impression on poets because the new biology of DNA employed many linguistic metaphors to represent biochemical genetic processes. The book will study poetic experiments by Language Poets that appear to emulate the work of geneticists decoding what they called the 'language of life.' There are no full-length studies of the science and poetry of this period. With a few exceptions critics concentrate on the poetic use of metaphors and images taken directly from scientific discourse, such as relativity or black holes. This approach sidesteps the question of what sort of knowledge and authority these terms have in poetic rhetoric. Insights from excellent research on high modernism cannot be directed applied to the postwar period because the character of science changed radically, as theories largely ceased to be the work of one charismatic individual, and models of matter and the organism became increasingly complex and ever further beyond sensory understanding. This study therefore centres on the concept of inquiry. Postwar modernist poets shared a commitment to intellectual inquiry in their poetry, whether they were investigating self, world, language or society, and they explored possible convergences with the role of research and inquiry in the sciences. The book will consider by close reading of poems and writings on poetics, to what extent these texts were sounding the possibilities of imaginative inquiry in a scientific culture, and contextualise them by contrasting varying roles of imagination and rhetoric in scientific discourse. The book as a whole will shed light on the impact of the natural sciences on contemporary culture, and on ways in which poetry and science can collaborateor complement one another.