Selected by Dr Oliver Tearle

'I am no poet,' the scientist Michael Faraday once said, 'but if you retrieve for yourselves, as I proceed, the facts will form a poem in your minds.' Although they're often viewed as being at odds – such as in John Keats's famous worry virtually Isaac Newton unweaving the rainbow through explaining the colour spectrum – scientific discipline and verse have oftentimes been bedfellows. Since the metaphysical poets such as John Donne and Andrew Marvell some 4 hundred years agone, whose work incorporated scientific ideas, poets over the last few centuries have engaged with scientific discoveries, questions, and ideas. Here are ten of the very best poems about science, engineering, and mechanism.

Edgar Allan Poe, 'Sonnet – To Science'. Poe was greatly interested in science, and among his literary achievements is a long prose-verse form-cum-essay, Eureka, which is subtitled in some editions of Poe's work 'An Essay on the Material and Spiritual Universe'. Withal, in this shorter poem, a sonnet following the Shakespearean or English rhyme scheme, Poe calls scientific discipline 'true daughter of Old Time' which 'alterest all things with thy peering optics', arguing that science has destroyed the human dearest of the fantastical or mystical.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Canto LVI from In Memoriam.

Who trusted God was dearest indeed
And honey Creation's final law –
Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek'd confronting his creed …

This poem from Tennyson's long elegy for his friend, Arthur Henry Hallam, was published in 1850. In this canto from the longer poem, Tennyson engages with the nineteenth-century geological debate surrounding the fossil record: the then-called 'dinosaur canto' sees Tennyson fearing the Nature (and God) don't value either the individual fauna inside a species or the species every bit a whole, because and then many 'types' have gone extinct.

Robert Browning, 'Caliban upon Setebos'.

'Thinketh He made it, with the sunday to match,
But not the stars; the stars came otherwise;
But made clouds, winds, meteors, such equally that:
Too this island, what lives and grows thereon,
And snaky sea which rounds and ends the aforementioned …

A skillful science verse form to pair with Tennyson's above. Although its virtually firsthand literary inspiration was Shakespeare'south The Storm, this 1863 poem by Robert Browning (1812-89) was written just four years after the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, and the poem is a response to the implications of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection.

Walt Whitman, 'When I Heard the Acquire'd Astronomer'.

When I heard the learn'd astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns earlier me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, split up, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How shortly unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself …

Science can increase the magic of the natural world, rather than detract from it. In this brusque poem, Whitman (1819-92) describes how hearing an astronomy lecture opens his heed up to the wonders of the night sky.

Emily Dickinson, 'A Light exists in Spring'. Equally the Keats example quoted at the commencement of this post demonstrates, not all poems about science have been celebratory. Here, Emily Dickinson examines the gulf between what science can analyse and sympathise, and what homo nature somehow senses in a style that stands aside from the scientific:

A Light exists in Leap
Non nowadays on the Year
At any other period –
When March is scarcely here

A Color stands away
On Alone Fields
That Science cannot overtake
Simply Homo Nature feels …

Ambrose Bierce, 'Technology'. Bierce (1842-c.1914) is all-time-known for The Devil'south Dictionary, just he was likewise a poet. Here he addresses in a comic poem the result of applied science:

'Twas a serious person with locks of gray
And a figure like a crescent;
His gravity, clearly, had come to stay,
Simply his grinning was evanescent …

Rudyard Kipling, 'The Secret of the Machines'. Kipling (1865-1936) was a prolific author of short stories and poems, and in this poem he ponders new engineering and machinery:

Nosotros were taken from the ore-bed and the mine,
We were melted in the furnace and the pit—
Nosotros were bandage and wrought and hammered to design,
Nosotros were cutting and filed and tooled and gauged to fit.
Some water, coal, and oil is all we ask,
And a thousandth of an inch to give us play:
And at present, if you volition set us to our job,
We will serve you four and twenty hours a day …

Stephen Spender, 'The Pylons'. For Spender (1909-95) in this poem, which spawned the name of a whole poetic movement (the 'Pylon Poets' of the 1930s), the electricity pylons springing upwardly across the English language countryside are symbols of the hereafter, placed in a landscape that has been largely unchanged for centuries. Whilst cities have been radically transformed in the concluding few hundred years by a succession of technological innovations – industry, factories, skyscrapers, the advent of the motorcar – the English language countryside has largely remained the same, yet this is precisely where the pylons have been situated … or, at least, is the place where they are the nearly conspicuous.

Edwin Morgan, 'The Computer'southward First Christmas Card'.  In this poem, the Scottish poet Edwin Morgan (1920-2010) gives us an unusual Christmas poem supposedly 'written' by a computer, and its endeavour to produce the simple bulletin 'Merry Christmas'. A humorous poem from the 1960s about the early on engineering of the modernistic reckoner.

Sarah Howe, 'Relativity'. Howe wrote this verse form about scientific ideas – specifically relating to Einstein'southward Full general Theory of Relativity and its touch on on subsequent physics – and read it to Stephen Hawking, to whom the verse form is defended. It's beautiful, moving, and shows that science continues to inspire some of the finest poesy.

Discover more classic poetry with these birthday poems, brusk poems about expiry, and these archetype war poems. We as well recommend The Oxford Book of English Verse  – perhaps the best verse anthology on the market (nosotros offer our pick of the best poetry anthologies hither).

The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English language at Loughborough University. He is the writer of, among others,The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers' Journey Through Curiosities of History  andThe Great War, The Waste product Land and the Modernist Long Poem.