'Passion and Intellect So Closely Allied'

“The vocabulary of science is sometimes arcane, uncouth, and even downright ugly. There ought to be prizes for poets who can use the term quantum correctly and the word xylocarp gracefully.” 

I’m no poet but as a retired science writer I confess to having used the words stochastic, exosome, endogenous and throughput with a straight face. That still leaves me feeling a little guilty. Clarity is the prime virtue in prose. What you’re saying has to be readily understood, without muddle or ambiguity. That’s where things get complicated and the nagging question of audience makes another appearance.

 

I was employed by an engineering school at a university and usually wrote about faculty and student research. Many of my readers were trained as scientists and engineers, long familiar with the specialized jargon of their trades. To a bioengineer or applied mathematician, the words I listed above are probably Dick-and-Jane transparent. But the bigger audience was more mysterious. High-school kids shopping for a university, along with their parents, were reading this stuff, among others. In addition, some arcane words have no readily defined synonyms. I was stuck sometimes with the rarified argot, especially stochastic. When I would ask a faculty member for clarification of a usage, some became tongue-tied. Why redefine the self-evident? The perplexity became even more complicated if my source spoke English as a second or third language. Some of them never learned demotic American English.

 

The passage at the top was written by the late poet and novelist Fred Chappell in a review, “‘A Million Million Suns’: Poetry and Science,” published in the Fall 1995 issue of The Georgia Review. Quantum is an enormously slippery word with dozens of legitimate uses. It’s rooted in the Latin for “quantity” and entered English in Shakespeare’s time, though he never used it. Xylocarp refers to fruit with a woody outer shell, such as the coconut. Chappell suggests an explanation for the apparent incompatibility of poetry and science:

 

“Poetry celebrates visual appearance while disciplines like chemistry and particle physics plunge below appearance into a universe often impossible to visualize, a void punctuated by brief pulses and intermittent bleeps of electromagnetic energy. There is, besides, the dread problem of accuracy: those of us who are forced to learn our science from popular texts, films, and lectures are likely to garble details and overleap stages of thought, impatient to come to the grandiose images of astronomy and the intriguing paradoxes of subatomic theory.”

 

Chappell finds the four poetry collections under review at least partially disappointing. He has kind words to say about Louise McNeill’s posthumously published Fermi’s Buffalo (1994) and quotes lines from her “Neutron Stars” –

 

“Burned and black to the neutron bone,

Dwarf stars stand in the night alone--

Dead black stars with their firestorms still--

I am burning and growing chill.”

 

-- and likens them to Walter Savage Landor’s “Dying Speech of an Old Philosopher.” Best of all, Chappell comes up with an interesting suggestion for poets and other writers:

 

“The history of science would seem a highly advantageous field of subject matter for poetry. Here as in few other areas of human endeavor are passion and intellect so closely allied, and almost no other kind of history presents such clear and verifiable outlines. There is a colorful attractiveness about even outmoded or discarded scientific concepts such as the aether, phlogiston, light pressure, Ptolemaic astronomy, and so forth. In the efforts of science, the differences between folly and honest error are especially striking, and our intellectual strivings are stained with pathos and humor in equal measure. If Montaigne were alive today, I think he might become a historiographer of science.”