LIGHT BECOMES DARKNESS
By:
August 20, 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.
The decay of cathedrals
is efflorescent
through the phenomenal
growth of movie houses
whose catholicity is
progress since
destruction and creation
are simultaneous
without sacrifice
of even the smallest
detail even to the
volcanic organ whose
woe is translatable
to joy if light becomes
darkness and darkness
light, as it will —
But schism which seems
adamant is diverted
from the perpendicular
by simply rotating the object
cleaving away the root of
disaster which it
seemed to foster. Thus
the movies are a moral force
Nightly the crowds
with the closeness and
universality of sand
witness the selfpittle
which used to be drowned
in incense and intoned
over by the supple-jointed
imagination of inoffensiveness
backed by biblical
rigidity made into passion plays
upon the altar to
attract the dynamic mob
whose female relative
sweeping grass Tolstoi
saw injected into
the Russian nobility.
— from the author’s Spring and All (1923).
In Red Modernism (2017), Mark Steven writes that this poem makes it “clear how ideology functions, permeating consciousness by way of cultural institutions and thus forestalling revolution, dooming its subjects to a joyless life of hard labor.” Those energies that might result in an “adamant” revolution are redirected, by cathedrals and movie houses alike, into an “imagination of inoffensiveness.”
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.