By Sheldon Greaves
Musings” is perhaps more appropriate a description than most for this post. I recently ran across a thought-provoking post on the NCSE blog by Josh Rosneau on “The Science of Robert Frost.” Being a devotee of Frost’s poetry, especially after spending a few years living in New England where he wrote, I was delighted to discover that he had an active interest in science that found its way into his poetry. Poets, it seems, have had their place in the ranks of the scientific community; Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Percy Shelly were among the early members of the British Academy for the Advancement of Science. Rosneau add this interesting tidbit into the work of Frost:
One of the more recent parallels I came across was a report that Robert Frost’s famous poem “Fire and Ice” was inspired, or at least informed, by Frost’s conversations with an astronomer. Before setting pen to paper, he apparently asked how the world might end, and astronomer Harlow Shapley told him that either the sun would gradually expand and burn the earth to a crisp, or the earth would drift away from the sun until it froze solid. “Some say the earth will end in fire,” Frost’s resulting poem opened, “Some say in ice.”
From there, Frost draws an analogy to the destruction wrought by desire and by hate, which took him beyond Shapley’s stellar expertise, and into the figurative language of poetry.
I always enjoy seeing the products of one area of intellectual activity leap across the barriers that separate it from another, land, and bear fruit. The Poetry Foundation has taken Frost’s poetic musings and written guidelines on how a science teacher might use “Fire and Ice” as a prelude to discussing global climate change.
Others have also noted the kinship of science and poetry. Priscilla Long points to a wonderful observation by Poet Alice Hawthorne Demming: “[S]cientists, in their unflagging attraction to the unknown, love what they don’t know. It guides and motivates their work; it keeps them up late at night; and it makes that work poetic.” (Read the rest of Long’s essay here. It’s a gem.)
Science grows out of a sense of wonder and curiosity. Poetry–and most other arts–likewise involves a step into unknown territory, the desire to produce something fresh and new. It grows out of a sense of wonder and curiosity. It is that which makes them akin.