Abstract
Over the past century much-bruited developments in the physical sciences (and a concomitant physicization of biology, perhaps most prominent in molecular biology) have overshadowed a long-term tendency of the biologization of physics—clearly enunciated already in Alfred North Whitehead’s generalized “science of organisms.” Because such biologization occurs in a context in which science is understood to operate within a broader poetic canvas—a poetic universe, as it were—we should look to the poets for instruction in how to proceed in this tangled state of affairs. In the present essay, I turn to the MacArthur Fellow and Bollingen Prize winner Jay Wright, and the distinctive role modern physics has played in the formulation of his poetics. Ongoing conversations with the philosopher Susanne K. Langer and physicist Niels Bohr (and with Whitehead) inform Wright’s methodological multiculturalism, manifestly including literary and scientific cultures, as well as his robust analysis of “the poet’s primary province, feeling.”
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Meyer, S. (2020). To Feel an Equation: Physiological Aesthetics, Modern Physics, and the Poetry of Jay Wright. In: Ahuja, N., et al. The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science. Palgrave Handbooks of Literature and Science. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48244-2_18
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