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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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• Very, Jones: New England Christian mystic, at first much-acclaimed by the Transcendentalists. He was considered clinically insane by many of his other contemporaries, and spent time in an asylum. His attitude toward science normally oscillated between hostility and the traditional position of the Romantics, but he was scientifically literate (and oddly infatuated with telecommunications!).
  • The Camphene Lamp is a fire-hazard, and a typical example of bad technology!
  • The Comet Essentially a pre-scientific poem.
  • On the Completion of the Pacific Telegraph That it occurred during the Civil War is a good omen for the North.
  • Evolution may or may not have happened, but God is man's true origin either way.
  • The First Atlantic Telegraph is part of God's plan.
  • The First Telegraph Message "What hath God wrought?"
  • To the Fossil Flower Whether it lived before or after the arrival of humans--perhaps it was even part of the original creation!--it exists now to awaken thoughts of love and of deep time.
  • The Glacial Marks on our Hills Very strong geology poem. (Last stanza on next page.)
  • Hymn Sung at the Dedication of the Peabody Academy of Science Science seeks the ends for which things were designed, i.e., how they may serve humans, as God intended.
  • Know Thyself Religious reflexions inspired by a lecture on anatomy.
  • The Man of Science learns the lesson of Job. This seems to be the poem that best exemplifies Very's attitude to science.
  • The Meteorologists Science is all very well, but only if it leads to higher transcendental truths.
  • The Moss and its Teachings The mighty works of God, visible through a microscope.
  • The Mound-Builders were fellow humans, made in God's image, although nothing is known about them.
  • Nature Intelligible Traditional Romantic view of science.
  • Nature a Living Teacher as opposed to science.
  • The Origin of Man is God. (But this is only glancingly an anti-evolution poem; its main targets seem to be various "misguided" forms of traditional religion.)
  • The Potato Blight is a message from God, not something explicable by science.
  • The Railroad as a John the Baptist image.
  • Ship Rock is a glacial erratic, but this fact is of minor interest to the poet, who is more concerned with humans and with God.
  • The Telephone is marvelous!
  • The Triumphs of Science and of Faith If religion were as advanced as technology (in the age of the Transatlantic Cable), there would be no war.
  • The Zodiacal Light Mentions several theories of its origin.

• Walker, William Sidney:
  • Written at the Close of a College Examination

• Watson, Evelyn Mabel:
  • The Builder All the various theories are building blocks for the temple of the soul.
  • Phenomenon Not a wonderful poem, but many naturalists have made the same observation: dead birds are surprisingly hard to find.
  • Progression Plants: "Who says they are a lower order than we?"

• Watson, William:
  • To the Hon. Stephen Coleridge "...on his labours in mitigation of animal suffering."
  • The Prodigy About a comet visible during the Great War.
  • Tenth Sonnet to Miranda One of a long series of love poems; this one (published in 1909) apparently alludes to the discovery of radioactivity.
  • Vivisection
  • What Science Says to Truth I am the sea and you are the land: I erode you away a grain by grain.

• Webber, James B.:
  • The Telegraph In Border Scots dialect.

• Webster, Augusta:
  • An Inventor ... dying with his work unfinished.

• Wheeler Wilcox, Ella: Sentimental poet, very popular in her day.
  • All for Me Science-related part is on second page.
  • Creation ... (including evolution) is an expression of love.
  • The Mill "Great and devastating as are the evils connected with child and woman labor in mills and factories, there must be many a man and woman who finds happiness in the work which these maunfactories afford."
  • Plea to Science Just leave Jesus alone, OK? He's important to me.
  • Sirius Although the "droll tale of Genesis" is absurdly parochial, the vastness of the universe revealed by modern astronomy testifies to the incomprehensible greatness of God.

• White, Henry Kirke:
  • Clifton Grove White's best-known poem, praising (although somewhat ambivalently) the countryside and contrasting it (p. 2) with the town where 'manufacture taints the ambient skies' and the soul of the 'pale mechanic'.
  • Lines Written on a Survey of the Heavens Astronomy leads to thoughts of God and the vanity of earthly ambitions.
  • Time Very long. Includes a passage anticipating Macaulay's New Zealander.
  • The Wonderful Juggler About Napoleon, who has plans for submarines and war balloons.

• Whitman, Walt:
  • On the Beach at Night Alone The interconnectedness of all things.
  • Eidólons "Beyond thy telescope or spectroscope, observer keen ..."
  • Kosmos Nineteenth Century Romantic holism.
  • To a Locomotive in Winter "Type of the modern! emblem of motion and power! For once, come serve the Muse."
    • Musical setting by Greg Bartholomew
  • Miracles All things are miracles.
  • Song of the Universal "Lo ! keen eyed towering science ... Yet again, lo ! The soul above all science."
  • When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer This is often considered the quintessential anti-science poem, but Whitman was part of a pro-science Romantic tradition. His real target is not science per se, but science divorced from direct, often mystical, experience of Nature.
    • Musical setting by Kevin Cope
    • Musical setting by Jeremy Harris
    • Musical setting by Barry Seroff
    • Musical setting by Roger Zahab
  • The World Below the Brine The deep sea (one of the Nineteenth Century's scientific frontiers) as an alien universe.
  • Year of Meteors The year 1859-1860, significant astronomically and otherwise.

• Whitsett, William Thornton:
  • The New; the Old "The Old" is the vast, impersonal cosmos revealed by science; "the New" is the Now, all things in Nature joined together by God.
  • Thought Newton, Galileo, and Kepler as God-like (sic) heroes.

• Wilcox, Carlos:
  • Sights and Sounds of the Night Meaning the Northern Lights. The question of whether the aurora produces a sound was much debated in the Nineteenth Century.

• Williams, Sarah:
  • The Old Astronomer Famous (but over-long) sentimental poem about a dying scientist. Contains the much-quoted line "I have loved the stars too truly to be fearful of the night."

• Willis, Nathaniel Parker: Best known as Poe's friend and editor.
  • The Scholar of Thebet Ben Khorat In Twenty-first Century English, the title would be "The Student Assistant of Thābit ibn Qurra," the Ninth Century Sabian scientist and wizard. More technical than most astronomy poems, even though the moral is that science drives people mad.

• Wilson, Edmund, Jr.: A prominent man of letters, Wilson was one of the most influential literary scholars of the Twentieth Century.
  • Death of an Efficiency Expert Part of The Undertaker's Garland, a book of morbidly comic rhymed verse that young Wilson and his friend John Peale Bishop wrote upon their return from the Great War.

• Wolcot, John: Peculiar, longwinded, digressive satirist.
  • Peter Pindar's Prophecy on the Royal Society Election
  • To the Reviewers Contains a line about Newton's personality (p. 6).

• Wood, Charles Erskine Scott: In his long and amazingly varied life, he managed to embody almost every stereotype about the Pacific Northwest: he was an Indian-fighting soldier, corporate lawyer, bohemian artist, rich dandy, liberal Democrat, and revolutionary anarchist. He was often several of these at once.
  • The Poet in the Desert Long, anti-scientific, vaguely Taoist piece. This is the 1915 version, highly political; Wood published a revised, somewhat less strident edition in 1918. The desert in question is southeastern Oregon.
    • Birth Earlier Than Death Future and (mesozoic) past are somehow linked. This is part of an antinomian paean to anarchy.
    • By the Great Original An oddly pessimistic evolutionist justification for dismissing bourgeois morality.
    • Is Not Man of Nature Too? Wood's take on evolution, which (like most Nineteenth Century non-scientists) he conflates with some form of progress. From The Poet in the Desert.

• Wood, Robert W.: The famous physicist and sceptic wrote and illustrated two books of comic biological verse for children.
  • Animal Analogues
  • How to Tell the Birds from the Flowers

• Wordsworth, William:
  • The Eclipse of the Sun, 1820 as the poet witnessed it.
  • The Excursion, Book III: Much geological imagery, some of it technical.
  • The Excursion, Book IV: Successes and failures of reason.
  • The Excursion, Book VIII: True science vs. false.
  • Lines Written as a School Exercise At age 14, praising the age of Reason and Protestantism, considered synonymous.
  • The Pass of Kirkstone : Geological time.
  • Prologue to Peter Bell An imagined space-voyage.
  • To the Planet Venus, Upon its Approximation to the Earth, Jan. 1838: "Science advances with gigantic strides // But are we aught enriched in love and meekness ?"
  • The Power of Education The triumph of science of superstition. Perhaps Wordsworth's first poem, written when he was 14.
  • The Prelude, Book III (Cambridge) and Book VI (Cambridge and the Alps)
  • The River Duddon, II: A vision of prehistory.
  • Star Gazers Although the poet is unsure of the reason, people who look through a telescope always go away less happy than before. Arguably one of the most anti-scientific poems of the century, the more surprising in light of Wordsworth's long, friendly association with astronomers, including the Hamiltons. Perhaps it is significant that the telescope is operated by a "Show-man" and the people who go away unhappy are said to "pry & pore" as they look through it. In any case, an early poem (1806).

• Wynne, Annette:
  • The Telegraph A children's poem, but very similar to other telegraphy poems.
  • The Airplane Apparently written in some alternate Nineteenth Century where it was not uncommon to see an airplane "spread its wings like a butterfly"! Perhaps there is a connexion to Wynne's poem The Sparrow's Little Wings which contrasts birds with airplanes.
  • To a Bird How does it know so many things without human intelligence?
  • Friendly Little Wishes Affect the wireless.
  • High and Mighty To a telephone pole.
  • It Must Have Been Quite Queer to have lived before autos, airplanes, or trollies, as did George Washington.
  • Lands and Oceans A gravity poem.
  • The Sea That Comes to Meet My Hand One of Wynne's many round-earther poems.
  • The Water Falls Upon the Ground A couplet about gravity.
  • The Wires Are So Still and High Can the birds hear the messages in the wires as they sit on them?

• Yeats, William Butler: Yeats rarely addressed science or technology in his poems, claiming to prefer (and indeed to practise) magic. That being said, his occultism (shaped by the quasi-academic style of the Golden Dawn and later by the philosophical complexities of Eastern religion) was so formal and rigorous that it might as well have been a branch of physics or engineering.
  • The Song of the Happy Shepherd The usual neo-pagan lament about the disenchantment of the world: Seek, then, no learning from the starry men who follow with the optic glass the whirling ways of stars that pass ... the cold star-bane has cloven and rent their hearts in twain...