The poetry of Victorian scientists
Subtitle: style, science and nonsense
By: Daniel Brown
Series: Cambridge studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture -- 83
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2012
Place of publication: Cambridge
Language: eng
Number of pages: 310
ISBN-13: 9781107023376
Subjects: Scientists' writings; Literature and science; History and criticism; English poetry; History
Description: "A surprising number of Victorian scientists wrote poetry. Many came to science as children through such games as the spinning-top, soap-bubbles and mathematical puzzles, and this playfulness carried through to both their professional work and writing of lyrical and satirical verse. This is the first study of an oddly neglected body of work that offers a unique record of the nature and cultures of Victorian science. Such figures as the physicist James Clerk Maxwell toy with ideas of nonsense, as through their poetry they strive to delineate the boundaries of the new professional science and discover the nature of scientific creativity. Also considering Edward Lear, Daniel Brown finds the Victorian renaissances in research science and nonsense literature to be curiously interrelated. Whereas science and literature studies have mostly focused upon canonical literary figures, this original and important book conversely explores the uses literature was put to by eminent Victorian scientists"--

"Many came to science as children through such games as the spinning-top, soap-bubbles, and mathematical puzzles, and this playfulness carried through to both their professional work and writing of lyrical and satirical verse. This is the first study of an oddly neglected body of work that offers a unique record of the nature and cultures of Victorian science. Such figures as the physicist James Clerk Maxwell toy with ideas of nonsense, as through their poetry they strive to delineate the boundaries of the new professional science and discover the nature of scientific creativity"--
Table of contents: title: Machine generated contents note: 1. Professionals and amateurs, work and play: William Rowan Hamilton, Edward Lear and James Clerk Maxwell; 2. Edinburgh natural philosophy and Cambridge mathematics; 3. Knowing more than you think: James Clerk Maxwell on puns, analogies and dreams; 4. Red Lions: Edward Forbes and James Clerk Maxwell; 5. Popular science lectures: 'A Tyndallic Ode'; 6. John Tyndall and 'The Scientific Use of the Imagination'; 7. 'Molecular Evolution': Maxwell, Tyndall and Lucretius; 8. James Joseph Sylvester: the romance of space; 9. James Joseph Sylvester: the calculus of forms; 10. Science on Parnassus; Bibliography; Index.