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!
- Pain, Barry:
-
Palgrave, William Gifford: A colourful Victorian scholar, diplomat,
explorer, and religious seeker.
-
A Vision of Life, Book III, Canto X
"Those misled by Science: their doom is to dwell in a world such as they planned."
Canto XI follows this with an attack on British technology, "contrasted with the charm of
pure and unspoiled Nature". Canto XII condemns the railroad and the telegraph (which
broke "the bonds wisely set between nations"). Cantos XIII and XIV tell a sort of
Atlantis myth: a scientific utopia is destroyed by its own arrogance.
- Patmore, Coventry:
The author of The Angel in the House
wasn't too keen on astronomy ...
-
Phillips, Stephen: Best known, perhaps, for his "free adaptation" of Faust, and
for his many original poems about the Great War. He was a critic of industry and "Progress", but some of
his writings are astonishingly racist, even by the lamentable standards of the early 1900s.
-
Pike, Gen. Albert:
Best known as the leading theorist of Freemasonry, but also a pro-slavery activist (from Boston, of all places), a Confederate diplomat and (conspicuously unsuccessful) general, and a poet. In his youth he travelled around the Wild West, which looms large in his verse.
- Poe, Edgar Allen:
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Al Aaraaf Mythologises Tycho's nova.
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Sonnet --- To Science Famous anti-scientific screed -- and yet Poe was
a scientist in his own right, and expressed his vision of Naturphilosophie
in the "prose poem"
Eureka.
- Praed, Winthrop Mackworth:
- Quiller-Couch, Sir Arthur ("Q"):
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Rankine, W. J. M.: The great physicist and mechanical
engineer was also a poet, essayist, and song-writer.
- Rawnsley, Hardwicke Drummond:
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John Couch Adams the discoverer of Neptune:
"In his narrow room ... he searched the
Heavens and found a world."
- Reid, James D.:
-
The Mystic Wire is in the Air One of the first and
most popular of the many poems about telegraphy, apparently
meant to be sung. Reid was a professional telegrapher; the
refrain ("Four thousand miles ...") is a "found poem", a line
in an advertising brochure that Reid noticed was accidentally in
iambic metre.
-
Rice, Roswell:
- Richards, William C.:
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Electron a sort of epic poem about electricity.
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Riley, James Whitcomb:
Once immensely popular, especially for his children's and Indiana
dialect poems.
- Robb, A. A.:
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Roberts, Charles G. D.:
One of Canada's first major poets, although one would never guess that from the poems included here.
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Robinson, Edwin Arlington:
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The Man Against the Sky
The world is a blind rush of atoms in the void, etc.
-
Modernities
Modern science will eventually be as obsolete "as any told // In almagest or chronicle of old."
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Robinson, Mary F.:
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Darwinism
Evolution is the inchoate longing to improve.
-
The Stars
A subtle Victorian doubt poem with extraterrestrial life and cosmic
vastness.
- Ross, Sir Ronald:
Nobel laureate for physiology or medicine (1902). Although best known for
discovering that mosquitoes are the vector of malaria, he also
conducted pioneering work
in mathematical epidemiology, and in his old age wrote a book on
Clifford algebra. He spent part of his
career in India; unlike many imperialists, he took a genuine interest
in the people and is
remembered there today as a national hero.
-
In Exile:
Very long; Ross's spiritual autobiography.
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Indian Fevers: Pure research must precede finding cures, a lesson
evidently still unlearnt 130 years later.
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Man ... has mastered the universe, but not yet himself.
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Science: The bold genius carries on in the face of universal scorn.
- Rossetti, Christina:
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All Thy Works Praise Thee, O Lord including galaxies and
nebulæ: "No thing is far or near, and therefore
we float neither far nor near; but where we be weave dances
round the Throne perpetually."
-
Later Life, Sonnet 9: Sirius and Polaris
... are in harmony despite their disparate (geocentric)
locations.
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Who Has Seen the Wind? Called by Rossetti
herself a "children's poem" or
"nursery rhyme", but despite its simplicity a profound meditation on
epistemology, among many other things. There are seemingly innumerable
musical settings;
those below are merely ones for which we could find
videos on YouTube.
-
Ruskin, John:
Who once told a Manchester manufacturer: "No Florentine would
have endured the sight of any smoke or blackness in his city, or
near it, for half-an-hour ... Use the sun, the wind, and the rain.
And, under certain limited needs, you may light fire, or use a
fan, or distil water. But to live by Fire is diabolical."
