Quantum Poetics

BOOK REVIEWS he craftily reminds his reader that "Any controversy, however, must deal as best it can with stories, because the stories of Modernist creation and invention may in the end be the whole content and nothing but the content of the historical object called Modernism." By finishing with an acknowledgment of the inescapability of engaging in narrative in a study that otherwise represents cultural production generally as merely following in the wake of mathematics and the physical sciences—that is, those forms of knowledge that are non-narrative—Everdell intends to disarm would-be detractors, especially those of poststructuralist orientation . And by casting his parting claim in the conditional—"If the stories in this book make sense, then Modernism is still with us"—he signals that he is keenly aware of the paradoxes his presentation of the evidence has generated. I strongly recommend Everdell's book for scholars and casual readers alike. Even those of its claims that are questionable are formidably provocative , and if it does not succeed in ending inquiry it certainly succeeds in deepening it, which is precisely what a work on so paradoxical and diffuse an object of study ought to do. The generic anomalies of The First Moderns—particularly its length and eclecticism—may keep it from being widely used as a textbook in the undergraduate or graduate classroom; how many courses, after all, are offered on what Everdell identifies as its supradiscipline, "intellectual history"? But hopefully this fact will not prevent it from receiving the attention it deserves as a major contribution to our understanding of an intricate constellation of discoveries and ideas. A. Michael Matin Columbia University Quantum Poetics Daniel Albright. Quantum Poetics: Yeats, Pound, Eliot and the Science of Modernism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. χ + 307 pp. $59.95 ANYONE TURNING to Quantum Poetics: Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and the Science of Modernism in search of sustained comparisons between quantum theory and modernist poetry will be disappointed. Unlike some scholars in the social studies of science, Albright makes no claims that there are common cultural forces that act on both art and science: "The fact that actual scientists also [like poets] found themselves in exasperating positions when trying to explain the real world according to a particle model or a wave model is only a nice analogy, not a proof of some 337 ELT 41 : 3 1998 profound congruence between science and art." What Albright proposes in Quantum Poetics is an influence study, an investigation of the "the appropriation of scientific metaphors by poets." Albright argues that "the methods of physicists helped to inspire poets to search for the elementary particles of which poems were constructed—poememes, one might call them" and that this search for the poememe leads to a sort of literary uncertainty relation: "the more narrowly the Modernists tried to isolate the poememe, the more elusive it became." Such research into the influence of science on poetry has produced fruitful scholarship in the past, from Marjorie Hope Nicholson's classic study Newton Demands the Muse (1946) to Lisa Steinman's more recent Made in America: Science, Technology, and American Modernist Poets (1987), in which Steinman documents the ways in which Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams validated their work by borrowing from science. There has not yet been a study which details the borrowings of modernist poets from quantum theory. The project Albright proposes is a timely one. It is not one, however, that he carries out in this book. Except for a few references to Einstein and relativity theory in the introductory chapter, Albright makes scant reference to physics—or to any other branch of modern science, for that matter. His only reference to Niels Bohr comes from a passage in Katherine Hayles's Chaos Bound; his only comments on Erwin Schrödinger are based on John Gribbin's popular science text In Search of Schrodinger 's Cat. In fact, Albright pays far more attention to how Yeats, Pound and Eliot responded to the writings of Leibniz—an interesting subject in its own right—than to what they thought about modern physics. The metaphors of "particle" and "wave" which shape Albright's discussion come not...