ASPIRATION
By:
June 20, 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.
Over the dark, thin nebular drift,
Waiting the warmth and light;
Over the writhing, blazing sun,
And planets, half day, half night;
Comets that race with a trail of fire,
Asteroids whirling along —
Something is brooding, impelling;
Something that cannot be wrong.
Up from the unseen germ and cell,
Potent with glory unborn;
Up from the fish of the Devon sea,
And saurians feeding at morn;
Jungle glooms where the lion lurks,
And dark-eyed cavegirl’s song —
Something is moving, compelling;
Something that cannot do wrong.
Out of our little joy and pain,
Hope and love’s warm breath;
Out of mazes and mysteries,
War, disease, and death;
Care for self and love of friends,
Will to be kind, yet strong —
Something is striving, excelling;
Something that cannot go wrong.
— found in Copeland’s 1922 collection Whimsical Rimes. Republished in the August 1926 issue of Gernsback’s pioneering sf magazine Amazing Stories. Gernsback started publishing in April 1926, but this — in August — was the first poem published in the first sf magazine.
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.