Book Title | The Poetry Of John Tyndall |
Book Author | Nicola Jackson |
Total Pages | 237 |
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Language | English |
Book Download | PDF Direct Download Link |
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The Poetry of John Tyndall
Roland Jackson, Nicola Jackson and Daniel Brown
THE POETRY OF JOHN TYNDALL
Poetry in context
Introduction
In 1864, when he was in his early 40s, the sceptical John Tyndall, physicist and emerging public intellectual, attended a séance. He wrote an amusing account of the episode in The Reader magazine, in which he reported that the spirits had dubbed him ‘The Poet of Science’.1 In this guise he preceded his friend Alfred Tennyson, who was not so described until after his death.
Yet the meaning of ‘poet’ here needs qualifying. It was the vivid language Tyndall used in his lectures and books that gave him this status, not least in his writings about mountains and landscape.
As W. T. Jeans wrote in 1887: ‘I do not know that he has ever written poetry, but he is certainly a poet in the fire of his imagination and in his love for all the forms of natural beauty.’3 Few people were aware that Tyndall did indeed write poetry.
In this book, we publish for the first time all Tyndall’s extant poetry. The volume consists of 76 poems and significant fragments. While they were written throughout his lifetime, the majority date from the 1840s and 1850s when Tyndall was in his 20s and 30s. To introduce this collection, we explore what the poems can tell us about:
Tyndall himself; his values and beliefs; the role of poetry for him and his wider circle; and, more broadly, the relationship between the scientific and poetic imaginations, and wider questions of the nature and purpose of poetry in relation to science and religion in the nineteenth century.
Tyndall’s poems fall into several categories, from early political statements, through explorations of personal relationships, to deep reflections on Nature and the universe. There are some powerful and
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