At the beginning of the twentieth century the English poet Robert Bridges declared:

Taking geology as his first example, he continued:

Bridges's poem, entitled Now in Wintry Delights (1903), seems fustily antique, yet it anticipates surprisingly precisely poetry's wider engagement with science in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. On the one hand, Bridges defers to science. He promises to ‘attend’ to its teaching, to ‘learn’ its methods, in order to advance his own understanding. Educated in classics at Oxford in the 1860s, Bridges had retrained in medicine at St Bartholomew's Hospital in London in the early 1870s. He went on to work as a physician in a number of hospitals before coming into the private income which allowed him to work full-time on his poetry. Like several other prominent twentieth-century poets – William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore and A. R. Ammons among them – Bridges's scientific training gave him both a respect for science and a confidence when it came to incorporating it into his poetry.