MY AGE
By:
September 21, 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.
Song and giant cities, dream-avalanches,
Faded lands, poles without glory,
The sinful women, perils and heroism,
Spectral brewings, storm on iron rails.
In cloudy distances the propellers drum.
Nations melt away. Books turn into witches.
The soul shrinks to tiny complexes.
Art is dead. The hours move in swifter circles.
O my age! So indescribably mutilated,
So without star, so existentially poor in knowledge
As you no other age seems to have been.
Never before did the sphinx raise its head so high!
But you see to the right and left of your path,
Dauntless in the face of affliction, insanity’s abyss weeping!
— “Meine Zeit” (often translated as “My Time” or “My Age”) was first published in 1916 in the collection Verse und Bilder. Also appears in the 1919/20 expressionist anthology Menschheitsdämmerung (ed. Kurt Pinthus), which in 1933 was banned by the Nazis. This translation is from the 1994 edition.
The Dadaists would credit early Expressionist poetry — I’m not sure whether they specified which poems — with anticipating their ideas. Before launching the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916, Hugo Ball and Richard Huelsenbeck actively operated within Berlin’s Expressionist theater and literary circles.
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.