“IS MAN A DISEASE…”
By:
June 29, 2025
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.
Is man a disease
that the blood of a senile star
cannot resist?
And when the constellations regard us,
is it fear, disgust, horror,
(at a plague-stricken brother
derelict from beauty),
that stares yonder
so sharply?
Gas the stars are.
They regard us not,
they judge us not,
they care for nothing.
We are alone in the hollow sky.
Then ours, though out of reach, those trinkets,
withheld,
unspoiled;
ours the sleeping and uncommanded genii
of those old lamps;
ours by right of mentality;
by right of agony,
by right of long heart-searching,
by right of all we must do with them
when our day comes,
when we have outlived our childishness,
when we have outgrown
the recurrent insanity of senility.
Then surely at last man,
and not bickering monkeys,
shall occupy the universe.
— Untitled poem from Olaf Stapledon’s 1932 proto-sf novel Last Men in London, written by its protagonist, Paul. “Lest he should lose sight of the wider bearings of that drama, Paul first meditated on the cosmical significance of human endeavour, which now for the first time was beginning to be tentatively apprehended by man himself. The immediate outcome of his meditation was this poem.”
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.