EQUATION

By: Herbert Read
July 12, 2024

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.

        a+ b + c = x

a

Hylas, the world’s percepted scene,
And man no less, the axle beam
Of mobile sense, exist but as
A notion in the mind of God.

b

And Columbine contributed,
Uttering a wise complaint:
Pierrot upon my stressèd breast —
The old moon in the new moon’s arms.

c

The subtle fury of a winter dusk;
A chord dissolving in the brain;
Portend
That knowledge and ideality
Are borne in the lapse of the menstrual
    sea.

x

Earth is machine and works to plan,
Winnowing space and time;
The ethic mind is engine too,
Accelerating in the void.

— From Mutations of the Phœnix (1923), published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press.

The principle of relativity is used as the basis for an ingenious metaphysical conceit.

***

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.