THE PURSE-SEINE
By:
June 4, 2026
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.
Lately I was looking from a night
mountain-top
On a wide city, the colored splendor,
galaxies of light: how could I help but
recall the seine-net
Gathering the luminous fish? I cannot
tell you how beautiful the city appeared,
and a little terrible.
I thought, We have geared the
machines and locked all together into
interdependence; we have built the
great cities; now
There is no escape. We have gathered
vast populations incapable of free
survival, insulated
From the strong earth, each person in
himself helpless, on all dependent. The
circle is closed, and the net
Is being hauled in. They hardly feel the
cords drawing, yet they shine already.
The inevitable mass-disasters
Will not come in our time nor in our
children’s, but we and our children
Must watch the net draw narrower,
government take all powers — or
revolution, and the new government
Take more than all, add to kept bodies kept
souls — or anarchy, the mass-disasters.
— Excerpt from the 1937 poem of this title. A “purse seine” is a large, wall-like net deployed around an entire school of fish in the open ocean.
Why is the tone of the poem so calm, even fatalistic? Jeffers promoted “Inhumanism” — a philosophical and ecopoetical concept that advocates for “a shifting of emphasis and significance from man to not-man,” i.e., rejecting the anthropocentric belief that human suffering, morality, or history is the center of reality. In this and other poems Jeffers urges readers to overcome their narcissism and recognize that humanity is merely one brief, fleeting, sometimes destructive expression within a vast, ancient, and indifferent universe. If this sounds depressing, please note that Jeffers’ philosophy asks us to passionately engage with the “transhuman magnificence” of geological time, deep space, and wild, autonomous nature.
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.