SUBURBS ON A HAZY DAY
By:
June 4, 2023
A series dedicated to poems, published c. 1900–1935, the Radium Age sf-adjacent themes of which include: dystopia and utopia, far-out mathematics and the fourth dimension, Afro-futurism, catastrophe, future war, new technologies, scientific breakthrough, dehumanization, cosmic awe, disenchantment and unseen forces, unknowable aliens and singularity. Research and selection by Joshua Glenn; thematic index here.
O stiffly shapen houses that change not,
What conjuror’s cloth was thrown across
you, and raised
To show you thus transfigured, changed,
Your stuff all gone, your menace almost
rased?
Such resolute shapes, so harshly set
In hollow blocks and cubes deformed, and
heaped
In void and null profusion, how is this?
In what strong aqua regia now are you
steeped?
That you lose the brick-stuff out of you
And hover like a presentment, fading faint
And vanquished, evaporate away
To leave but only the merest possible
taint!
— From “Rhyming Poems” (1913–1928, a section within the 1928 Collected Poems).
Aqua regia is a fuming solution of nitrohydrochloric acid. It was named by alchemists because it can dissolve the noble metals gold and platinum, though not all metals.
RADIUM AGE PROTO-SF POETRY: Stephen Spender’s THE PYLONS | George Sterling’s THE TESTIMONY OF THE SUNS | Archibald MacLeish’s EINSTEIN | Thomas Thornely’s THE ATOM | C.S. Lewis’s DYMER | Stephen Vincent Benét’s METROPOLITAN NIGHTMARE | Robert Frost’s FIRE AND ICE | Aldous Huxley’s FIFTH PHILOSOPHER’S SONG | Sara Teasdale’s “THERE WILL COME SOFT RAINS” | Edith Södergran’s ON FOOT I HAD TO… | Robert Graves’s WELSH INCIDENT | Nancy Cunard’s ZEPPELINS | D.H. Lawrence’s WELLSIAN FUTURES | & many more.