American Poetry and Physics in the Atomic Age

In the contemporary university system, the arts and humanities often must justify their existence in relation to other fields of knowledge production. In this age of “cognification,” when “[k]nowledge becomes a commodity,” exploitative reification does not spare—and rarely rewards—those of us who labor in the communicative, critical, and creative arts.¹ Michel Foucault once characterized this bias as “the ‘political economy’ of truth”—in which “‘[t]ruth’ [Foucault’s scare quotes] is centered on the form of scientific discourse and the institutions that produce it.”² We compete intramurally for funding and institutional support, faculty lines, even students. Outside the university, we struggle to secure favorable perceptions of our work. We hope to achieve a modicum of cultural and social authority in order to validate the arts and humanities as having epistemological force, thus licensing us to act as the Western university’s critical faculty and as the conscience of knowledge production.

With his latest critical study, Peter Middleton provides an account of an earlier moment in this familiar struggle. Physics Envy: American Poetry and Science in the Cold War and After tells the story of the “epistemological competition” between American poetry and physics (113), as well as the other fields of natural and social science that physics influenced. In light of present institutional and social circumstances, Middleton’s subject is both relevant and appealing. After the Second World War, physics provided a new epistemological standard for the American scene, wherein circulated “the idea that everyone could potentially be scientific in spirit at least” (7). This “everyone” included poets. Using theoretical models to discover imperceptible and hitherto unknown phenomena, physics exemplified “a process of reaching toward potentially new positive knowledge, not simply the transmission of an already-established theory, science, or fact” (2). With knowledge comes power, and the U.S. dropping of the atomic bomb and the subsequent arms race proved just how real that power was. Mid-century physicists openly claimed newfound responsibility as creators of new knowledge. As the perceived epitome of innovation and a seat of socioethical authority, their field became the object of what Middleton terms “a pervasive physics envy” for those in other natural sciences, as well as in the social sciences (9). Poetry was no different. Poets’ envy was “rational,” in Middleton’s view, since physics offered them an “opportunity” (10) to explore “the poetic right of experiment and inquiry” (13).

This notion of “inquiry” sets Middleton’s book apart from other studies of American poetry’s relationship to atomic age sciences. In Edward Brunner’s important study of the period’s noir poetics, scientific culture and its sphere of influence are approached as themes and poetic content, even if the poets rarely openly represent the atomic bomb and instead set out to detect the physical sciences’ hidden effects on everyday life.³ Although Middleton does trace scientific content, he acknowledges that he is not especially invested in close reading (12). Instead, he is more concerned with paying “close attention to the radiating discourses of scientists” and the writers’ prose responses (11). This discursive emphasis enables him to track the social impact of physics, including its effects on poets: “Poems, say the New American poets, can think and inquire. . . . They and other postwar poets in the modernist lineage repeatedly argue that poems need not concede epistemological primacy to any other domain of research, whether a natural, social, or human science” (21). These poets did “more than hold the sciences to ethical or aesthetic account”; they sought to produce new knowledge, as the sciences did (33).

In the first of the book’s three sections, Middleton explains that he is averse to critical theory because it has a “tendency to refuse to engage with epistemological questions as other than false consciousness” (24), and because, since the New Critics, “science has been incorporated into the DNA of modern literary theory” in order to validate literary and critical enterprises...