Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I Science and Contemporary Poetry: Cross-Cultural Soundings
- Part II Science in Modernist Poetry: Appropriations and Interrogations
- Part III Darwinian Dialogues: Four Modern Poets
- 9 ‘Accidental Variations’: Darwinian Traces in Yeats's Poetry
- 10 Making the Past Wake: Anthropological Survivals in Hardy's Poetry
- 11 Reading Bishop Reading Darwin
- 12 From Bergson to Darwin: Evolutionary Biology in the Poetry of Judith Wright
- Afterword
- Bibliography
- Index
12 - From Bergson to Darwin: Evolutionary Biology in the Poetry of Judith Wright
from Part III - Darwinian Dialogues: Four Modern Poets
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I Science and Contemporary Poetry: Cross-Cultural Soundings
- Part II Science in Modernist Poetry: Appropriations and Interrogations
- Part III Darwinian Dialogues: Four Modern Poets
- 9 ‘Accidental Variations’: Darwinian Traces in Yeats's Poetry
- 10 Making the Past Wake: Anthropological Survivals in Hardy's Poetry
- 11 Reading Bishop Reading Darwin
- 12 From Bergson to Darwin: Evolutionary Biology in the Poetry of Judith Wright
- Afterword
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In September 1969 Judith Wright – by then well established as Australia's leading poet, and soon to become equally celebrated as a resolute campaigner on behalf of its environment and indigenous peoples – gave a talk at a symposium in honour of the Nobel-Prize-winning Australian immunologist Macfarlane Burnet. Her title was ‘Science, Value and Meaning’. Beginning with C. P. Snow's famous lecture on ‘The Two Cultures’, which had been published a decade earlier, Wright remarked that Snow had ‘over-simplified the problem’. ‘The real split’, she suggested, was ‘not […] so much between scientists and literary intellectuals as between two sides of our own human nature’:
between the creative and imaginative, which is shared by scientists, inventors and the practitioners of the arts as well, and the mechanic or materialistic, the manipulative power-hungry side of us which seizes on the achievements of science and transforms them into technological machinery for uses which scientists themselves, as well as artists, often cannot help but deplore. (1975, 196)
Wright draws a clear distinction here between the act of imaginative creation, which she sees as common to science and the arts, and the instrumentalist worldview that appropriates the advances of science for its own ends. It is a distinction which not only draws parallels between the artist and the scientist, but binds the two together in a single and increasingly urgent project:
The artist should be following every step of the scientist, celebrating every new revelation and turning it from fact into imaginative knowledge, which is the bread of life; instead, it is the merchants of death – the makers of armaments, the servants of the machine – who are ahead of us everywhere. (201)
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Science in Modern PoetryNew Directions, pp. 194 - 209Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2012