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TECHNICAL NOTE: The great majority of the links below are to scanned antique books at the Internet Archive, most of them anthologies. Poems frequently run for several pages; when coming to the apparent end of a poem, turn the page to make sure!

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• MacKaye, Percy
  • The Air Voyage Up the Hudson Written on witnessing Wilbur Wright's flight from Governor's Island to Grant's Tomb and back, 1909 October 4.
  • The Arc Light The untitled poem on the following page ("She stood before a florist's window pane ... ") may be part of the same work.
  • The Automobile: A First Ride, 1904
  • Edison Phonograph, moving-picture camera, stock-ticker and so on are valuable only if they point to some transcendent realm, or at least not to evil. Fortunately, Edison has good intentions.
  • Goethals God's sub-creator! The engineer-as-poet theme is interesting.
  • The Heart in the Jar: In 1912, the Nobel prize for medicine was awarded to Alexis Carrel, whose work on keeping blood-vessels and organs alive outside the body (some of it conducted, amazingly enough, in collaboration with the aviator Charles Lindbergh) would eventually lead to heart-transplantation technology.
  • Panama Hymn

• Malone, Walter: A Southern US poet (and judge) who admired the Romantics, especially Shelley, but preached the characteristic late-Victorian creed of Manly Self-Reliance. His poetry, unpopular with his contemporaries and forgotten since his death, is better than one might expect, and his political views, although hard to pin down, seem surprisingly radical.
  • The Agnostic's Creed. Typical of middle-class American male thought ca. 1900: brave, bluff, well-meaning, but just a bit shallow; one imagines the speaker addressing his Masonic Lodge.
  • Dynamite is a force for liberation of the enslaved.
  • Hernando De Soto, Book VI, Book XXII, and Book XXVI. Hernando De Soto is an epic poem, 592 pages long, about the conquistador's exploits on both American continents. One of the major characters, Codro, is an omniscient wizard-scientist. In Books VI and XXII, Codro foretells the coming of the industrialised US; in Book XXVI he guides the dying hero through an evolutionist prehistory. (The next book, unexpectedly, features Norse gods battling Fenris Wolf and the Midgard Serpent!)
  • The Tomb of Galileo, "The second Joshua, at whose command // The heavens ceased turning and the sun stood still."
  • The Union of the Seas. "On the Completion of the Panama Canal".

• Markham, Edwin:
  • The Climb of Life Illustrates the close connexion between evolution and pantheism in Nineteenth Century thought.
  • Divine Vision God directs evolution.
  • The Mighty Hundred Years An hymn to the Nineteenth Century.

• Masefield, John: Today he is remembered as the author of "Sea-Fever", of "Cargoes" (below), and of old-fashioned, unfashionable nautical poetry, some of it in unreadable dialect. However, much of his verse is not like that at all, but addresses the despair of post-religious, scientific Victorian man seeking some new source of spiritual meaning. His contemporaries seem to have been greatly impressed.
  • The Blacksmith A very complex and interesting poem; I don't know how to summarise it.
  • Cargoes Modern technology is unromantic.
    • Musical setting by Toby Darling
    • Musical setting by "Nigel" a YouTube performer
    • Musical setting by Martin Shaw performed by R. Malcolm.
  • If all be governed by the moving stars On the surface an astrology poem, but actually about the late Nineteenth Century world-view. (Includes the poems "In emptiest furthest heaven" and "Perhaps in chasms".)
  • Lollingdon Downs Fifteen-part poem seeking the meaning of life in the light of biological and astronomical advances.
  • So in the empty sky the stars appear (Continued on next page.) A typical Later Victorian cosmic meditation.
  • There are two forms of life Four poems in which the speaker tries to come to terms with evolution.
  • What am I, Life? "A thing of watery salt held in cohesion by unresting cells."

• Masters, Edgar Lee: Very complex, difficult poems. Many of them represent the inhabitants of Masters's fictional Spoon River, muttering in their graves.
  • Alonzo Churchill: A Romantic astronomer.
  • Dr. Burke: From the murder-novel in verse Domesday Book.
  • Dr. Scudder's Clinical Lecture: A physician's technical talk wanders into stranger and stranger territory as he remembers one of his patients.
  • Franklin Jones: Would-be (or rather, would-have-been) inventor of a flying machine.
  • Mr. and Mrs. Sibley: Two connected poems very typical of the Spoon River Anthology; the second uses Masters' favourite scientific metaphors, gravitation and stratigraphy.
  • Neanderthal: An attempt to find meaning in human evolution.
  • Nel Mezzo del Camin: "You call this a world!"
  • Out of the Dust (Beelzebub's Song): Pessimistic take on evolution.
  • Over the Soundless Depths (The Sun's Song): The end of the Spoon River Anthology.
  • Perry Zoll: A scientist whose work ("on the intelligence of plants") is recognised too late.
  • Professor Newcomer: Why has evolution given man a mind of infinite aspirations when all nature cares about is survival?
  • Scholfield Huxley: People create wonderful things: science, technology, art ... They almost touch God. Then they die anyway.
  • To a Spirochaeta: On viewing a pathogen through the microscope.
  • They'd Never Know Me Now: A cynical take on America, included here because of the aëroplane section in the middle.
  • Trainor, the Druggist: Chemistry as psychological metaphor.
  • Tyrannosaurus, or Burning Letters: "He came and went, and what's your soul // And what is mine, with their crying needs? ... To think of monsters Mesozoic // Brightens though it dries no tears. // I'll dream for life of our walks by the river. // That was March and it's now July // And this remains: I'll love you forever. // Burn up the letters now. Goodbye."
  • Walter Simmons: Wrongly thought, even by himself, to be a genius.
  • William Jones: A naturalist who corresponds with Tyndall and others.

• Maxwell, James Clerk: Many of Maxwell's poems are on scientific or mathematical themes. They are frequently humourous and meant to be sung.
  • O Academic Muse
  • To the Additional Examiner for 1875
  • All the Snows Have Fled Translation of Horace Odes IV. vii.
  • Alone on a Hillside of Heather
  • British Association, 1874: Notes of the President's Address
  • (Cat's) Cradle Song, by a Babe in Knots
  • To the Chief Musician upon Nabla: A Tyndallic Ode
  • To the Committee of the Cayley Portrait Fund
  • The Death of Sir James, Lord of Douglas
  • To F. W. F[arrar] with Farrar's reply, beginning: "O Maxwell, if by reason's strength // And studying of Babbage, // You have transformed yourself at length // Into a mental cabbage ... "
  • O Had He First Been Swept Away Translation of Sophocles Ajax 1192-1222.
  • To Hermann Stoffkraft: A Paradoxical Ode
  • I've Heard the Rushing
  • To K. M. D.
  • Lectures to Women on Physical Science Two poems about attraction between student and teacher. It is difficult to believe that even the most repressed Victorian reader would not have noticed the various double entendres in the second one, and yet there is strong reason to doubt that they were intentional.
  • Lines Written Under the Conviction That It is Not Wise to Study Mathematics in November after One's Fire is Out
  • To Mrs. Maxwell
  • In Memory of Edward Wilson a student who changed his mind about how to solve a problem in mid-Tripos. "Gin a body hit a body // Will it fly? and where?"
  • Molecular Evolution
  • Nathalocus
  • Numa Pompilius
  • An Onset
  • Of Pearies and Their Origin
  • A Problem in Dynamics
  • Professor Tait, Loquitur (and Answer to Tait)
  • Recollections of Dreamland
  • Reflex Musings: Reflexions from Various Surfaces
  • Report on Tait's Lecture on Force
  • St. David's Day
  • Song of the Cub
  • Song of the Edinburgh Academician
  • A Student's Evening Hymn
  • There Are Some Folks That Say
  • There Lies Within a Long Recess a Bay ... Translation of Virgil's Æneid I. 159-169.
  • Valedictory Address to the D--n [Dean John Alexander Frere]
  • Valentine by a Telegraph Clerk ♂ to a Telegraph Clerk ♀ Comic telegraphy poems were a genre, and this was a famous and much-read example. It was probably the only Maxwell poem with a significant readership in his lifetime.
  • The Vampyre
  • A Vision: of a Wrangler, of a University, of Pedantry, and of Philosophy
  • While I Was Your Beloved One Translation of Horace Odes III. ix.
  • Whither, Whither, Reckless Romans ? Translation of Horace's Seventh Epode.
  • Why, When Our Sun Shines Clearest
  • Will You Come Along With Me ?

• May, Julia Harris:
  • A Star Can Be as Perfect as a Sun A somewhat geocentric "song from the woods of Maine".

• Melville, Herman:
  • Aurora Borealis Treated as a metaphor for the armies of the American Civil War.
    • Musical setting by Eric Sawyer.
  • Epilogue to Clarel "If Luther's day expand to Darwin's year // Shall that exclude the hope, foreclose the fear?"
  • The Maldive Shark
  • The New Ancient of Days About human fossils discovered at Engihoul, Belgium (as described in Lyell's Elements of Geology). It is clear that Melville chose to write about these particular fossils because "Engihoul" reminded him of "ghoul".
  • The New Zealot to the Sun Science will conquer superstition (here linked to hallucinogenic drugs!).
  • Pebbles A difficult poem. The first stanza alludes to government weather-bureaux, then a controversial innovation.
  • A Rail Road Cutting near Alexandria in 1855 The feats of Watts are more impressive than the Pyramids (which Melville seems to place near Alexandria).
  • In the Turret One of the first poems about fighting in an iron ship.
  • A Utilitarian View of the Monitor's Fight
  • We Fish From the novel Mardi.

• Meredith, George:
  • Lucifer in Starlight: Milton's Satan is depressed by the spectacle of the universal order.
  • Meditation Under Stars "What links are ours with orbs that are // So resolutely far?"
  • Melampus Describes the ideal Romantic scientist: a saint, almost a god, in complete harmony with the universe.
  • The World's Advance Progress is a spiral. Includes a description of a drunkard's random walk.

• Meynell, Alice: Roman Catholic political radical and suffragette. Her poetry shows that not all Late Nineteenth Century people considered science and religion at odds.
  • Christ in the Universe No other planet "knows the secret, cherished, perilous // The terrible, shamefast, frightened, whispered, sweet // Heart-shattering secret" of the Incarnation.
  • The Launch The afterlife has its own, undiscovered physics.

• Mifflin, Lloyd:
  • The Dawn of Science in the Twentieth Century Who knows what is coming?
  • To a Nature Student Forget Science; get involved in politics!

• Mitchell, S. Weir:
  • To Abraham Jacobi, M.D.
  • The Birth and Death of Pain For the fiftieth anniversary of general anæsthesia.
  • A Doctor's Century For the centennial of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, 1887.
  • Minerva Medica For D. Hayes Andrews, on the 50th anniversary of his receiving the M.D.
  • On the Portrait of Oliver Wendell Holmes by Sarah Whitman
  • To William H. Welch

• Miyazawa Kenji: A professional chemist and agricultural scientist remembered for his highly literary fantasy and science fiction, especially the 1927 novel Night on the Galactic Railroad. He was a practising Nichiren Buddhist with a strong interest in the unity of science and religion.
  • Fantasia Under the Clear Sky (at the Mizusawa Observatory) An interesting contrast to Whitman's Learn'd Astronomer. Ninomiya-Enright translation, 1957: the English text is probably under copyright. (The poem starts at the bottom of the page, but continues.)

• Monro, Harold:
  • Gravity Addressed as though it were a god. Very unusual.

• Monroe, Harriet:
  • In the Air Off on an aërial highway of the Twentieth Century!
  • Our Canal "To Colonel Goethals and the Other Laborers in the Canal Zone." Expresses the messianic and utopian idealism of American engineers, but (the envoi suggests) with reservations about how things will actually turn out.
  • For Peace Peace is the goal of all technology, even military technology. Written shortly before the Great War.
  • A Power-Plant The Fisk Street turbine power station in Chicago, considered as a temple.
  • The Telephone offers intimacy to parted friends.
  • The Turbine as a queenly woman; the engineer as her lover.

• Murray, R. F. ("A St. Andrews Man"):
  • The Delights of Mathematics did not exactly overwhelm this "bejant" (first-year University student).
  • The Science Club at the University of St Andrews. "Hurrah for the Brewery visit // And beer in liberal doses! // In the cause of Science, what is it // But inspecting a technical process?"

• Nicholson, Meredith:
  • The Earth ... may eventually all be explored, but will still be majestic and powerful.

• Noel, Roden:
  • The Call of the Caves A late example of geological Romanticism.
  • Livingstone in Africa, Canto V Livingstone contemplates the stars, and later imagines a Christian and industrialised (but not Europeanised) Africa.
  • A Modern Faust "My own object has been to write a poem dealing with ... the speculative difficulties peculiar to our day and generation, arising from the conflict between science and accepted creeds ..."
  • The Signalman About a terrible 1892 railway accident, caused by the error of an overworked and ill-treated signalman.

• Noyes, Alfred:
  • A Chant of the Ages Trying to come to terms with the scientific world-view.
  • Cubism Actually about the effect of seeing Sussex from the air.
  • A Sky Song Patriotic song about aerial warfare.
  • The Torch-Bearers Epic science-and-religion trilogy.
    1. Watchers of the Sky History of astronomy in verse.
       • The Observatory
       • Copernicus
       • Tycho Brahe
       • Kepler
       • Galileo
       • Newton
       • William Herschel Conducts
       • Sir John Herschel Remembers
       • Epilogue
    2. The Book of the Earth History of geology and evolutionary theory from Pythagoras to Darwin. Published in 1925 and not available online because of copyright issues.
    3. The Last Voyage Thoughts about medicine, religion, and physics, with mortality looming over all. Published in 1930 and not available online because of copyright issues.
  • Wireless At sea.