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Recalling Victorian scientists and their sung verse.

By PAUL COLLINS [New Scientist] – Poetry has been a long-standing tradition in the natural sciences, and Victorian scientists, in particular, had a wide-ranging education that fostered a powerful affinity with the Muse. “Nature, under its first editor Norman Lockyer, regularly published verse,” notes Daniel Brown, a professor of English at the University of Western Australia in Perth. Many of the central scientific figures of the day would converge on various social clubs, he adds, where they would “recite and indeed sing poems they had written”.

Brown has been investigating this unique strand of English verse for his new book, The Poetry of Victorian Scientists: Style, science and nonsense, to be published next year by Cambridge University Press. It should provide a welcome contrast to the bulk of previous studies on 19th-century poetry, which had found an ambivalence to science in the work of the era’s better-known voices, while ignoring the more informed verse of those practising the disciplines. Although never as skilfully executed as the work of Tennyson and his ilk, these poems are witty, playful, and reveal much about the interests and personalities of their writers.

James Clerk Maxwell, famous for his unifying theory of electromagnetism, was one of the most prominent Victorian poet scientists. Besides more serious attempts to express the trials of academic study, his work contained humorous ways to explain mathematical problems, such as A Problem in Dynamics, composed in 1854, which begins:

An inextensible heavy chain,
Lies on a smooth horizontal plane,
An impulsive force is applied at A,
Required the initial motion of K…

Continued at New Scientist | More Chronicle & Notices.

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