Quantum Poetics
Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and the Science of Modernism

Explores the complex intersection between science and poetry in the work of Yeats, Eliot and Pound.

Daniel Albright (Author)

9780521573054, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 28 January 1997

320 pages, 11 b/w illus.
23.6 x 16.1 x 2.6 cm, 0.645 kg

'Quantum Poetics offers a better context in which to make sense of Modernism's obsessive need to isolate elementary literary units: 'classicism', for example, might explain the temperament that produced the vortex, but reference to science explains the force and motion of the vortex itself. Best of all, Albright gives us a new way to understand how Modernism's various characteristic ambivalences resolve themselves.' Journal of English and Germanic Philology

Quantum Poetics examines the way modernist poets appropriated scientific metaphors as part of a general search for the pre-verbal origins of poetry. Daniel Albright traces Modernism's search for the elementary particles from which poems were constructed. The poetic possibilities offered by developments in scientific discourse intrigued Yeats, Eliot and Pound, writers intent on remapping the general theory of poetry. Using models supplied by physicists, Yeats sought for the basic units of poetic force, both through his sequence A Vision and through his belief in, and defence of, the purity of symbols. Pound's whole critical vocabulary, Albright claims, aims at drawing art and science together in a search for poetic precision, the tiniest textual particles that held poems together. Through a series of patient and original readings, Quantum Poetics demonstrates how modernists created a whole new way of thinking about poetry and science as two different aspects of the same quest.

List of illustrations
Notes on references
Introduction
Part I. Yeats's Waves: 1. Yeats's figures as reflections in water
2. Yeats and the avant-garde
3. The theme of homunculus: Yeats and Wyndham Lewis
4. Yeats and the sublime
Part II. Pound's Particles: 5. Minima (elementary particles of modernist poetry)
6. Symbol (Yeats's precursor to Pound's image)
7. The decay of symbols
8. Things in themselves (Pound's anti-allegorism)
9. Image (Kandinsky, Brancusi, Tchelitchew)
10. Units of rhythm (Antheil)
11. Ideogram
12. Vortex
13. The decay of vortices
14. The null set (Hugh Selwyn Mauberley)
Part III. Eliot's Waves: 15. Monadological metaphors in Eliot's early work
16. Narratives tied in knots
17. Christ-particles in Eliot's late work (relief form the waves)
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH]