AVE CAESAR
By:
June 23, 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.
No bitterness: our ancestors did it.
They were only ignorant and hopeful, they
wanted freedom but wealth too.
Their children will learn to hope for a
Caesar.
Or rather — for we are not aquiline
Romans but soft mixed colonists —
Some kindly Sicilian tyrant who’ll keep
Poverty and Carthage off until the Romans
arrive,
We are easy to manage, a gregarious
people,
Full of sentiment, clever at mechanics, and
we love our luxuries.
— appears in Solstice and Other Poems (1935). Not sure if it first appeared elsewhere.
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.