Daniel Shelley-Smith

A Review of Quantum Poetics: Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and the Science of Modernism by Daniel Albright
For any student of modernist poetics, Daniel Albrights Quantum Poetics would, no doubt, provide a valuable dissection of the principle dynamics and forces at work within the movements key texts, as well as an interesting examination of the philosophical and artistic motivations driving authors of that literary era. Sadly, however, I could not help but feel that many of the concepts covered make it an outdated source both for contemporary poets of this technological era and for poets concerning themselves with physics (and science in general). Some of this is to be expected; it was produced in 1999, and in the 12 years since then the world has undergone a period of rapid technological change, ultimately evolving our perceptions of reality and of ourselves. Contemporary poets of the early 21st century are bound to have a completely different set of paradigms to those discussed by Albright. I do not question his ability or knowledge as a theorist or an historian of modernism, but I have found myself in many cases disagreeing with his hypotheses and assumptions and have to question his knowledge of scientific principles that have been established as late as the 1950s. He sometimes misquotes these principles and often omits key details, and in doing so, I felt his conclusions being continuously undermined. He also begins to mention some very interesting ideas, but fails to develop them, ironically producing a text on modernism that has an accidentally postmodern tone, where the ideas I considered most were those I found to be absent; the art of Albrights book is definitely and sadly - in the gaps. It should be noted, however, that some of my criticisms are directed at the modernists themselves, not specifically at Albright. In the introductory chapter Albright states outright that this book does not concern itself with science, only with the appropriation of scientific metaphors by poets. This line seems intended to act as a disclaimer, to make it clear that the book is about poetry and not science, which, in the end, is true. However, the subtitle of the work does use the phrase the science of modernism. The problem is present throughout the introduction, clearly demonstrated through Modernist attitudes to the works of Albert Einstein; to put it succinctly, they didnt like the implications of Einsteins theories on art/literature. They ignored the simple fact that Einstein was not proposing an artistic interpretation of the universe, nor was he starting an artistic movement; he was deducing fundamental laws concerning the governing dynamics of the universe (as all physicists do), and that, like it or not, Einstein was mathematically proving and reporting simply what is. At the end of the day, the laws of physics cannot be changed to suit the artists whim; they were set 13.7 billion years ago and do not change. Art on the other hand is a human generation, a genre consisting of mediums with which to transpose ideas. It is a general impression I get from modernists that, though they seem to be born out of a rebellion against the romantic, they still overly personify art, as if art were a universal, all encompassing entity, important above all others. This is evident in some of the quotes Pound and Lewis mentioned by Albright, aimed at Einstein, as if the act of being an artist gave them license to pick and choose what was real and what was not. In later passages Albright even discusses Yeats criticism of the objectivity of science. There is a complete failure to understand that the objectivity of science lies in its search for fundamental laws, fundamental to the entire universe, not just the human sphere. Objectivity is, ultimately, one of sciences greatest attributes, and nothing to be

Daniel Shelley-Smith criticized. Among the things that should have been mentioned here is how Einsteins theories on relativity (both special and general) have since been tested experimentally to remarkable degrees of accuracy, and that it was Einstein who first proved the particle model of light. Albright attributes this to Max Planck instead. The truth, however, is that Max Planck considered his quanta as merely a mathematical means of understanding radiation, and actually firmly believed that light did not really exist as particles. He actively criticized Einstein for suggesting this possibility, even though in 1905 Einstein proved it through his work on the photoelectric effect, the work that won him the 1922 Nobel Prize in Physics. None of this is mentioned by Albright, nor is the vast wealth of knowledge about the Universe that has been gained through application of Einsteins theories, that could be used as a criticism against such modernist schools of thought. In short, the modernists appear to deify art, as opposed to their postmodern successors who value their art at a more personal and individual level. Albright himself appears to appropriate the views of modernist views and fails to be objective in his criticism within a scientific context. Alright also discusses the concepts of pre-text, text, and post-text in this introduction and subsequently fails to develop these ideas. The relationship that exists between these three concepts form the best appropriative metaphor from physics, especially considering the wave/particle approach Albright takes with his work. Anyone with some knowledge of the wave/particle duality of physics could quite clearly see the relationship in literature whereby the pre-text and text substitute the source and the event, and the post-text acts as the wave function. It is evident from the text that the work of Yeats focuses on the pre-text, or the importance on the idea of the text, that Ezra Pounds imagism forms the text itself, and that Lewis becomes the post-text, or the feedback loop existing between ideas emerging from the text. Where the text falters is in the fact that there is no link between the three within the context of the wave/particle duality that Albright appropriates to examine the three poets. This, I think, is a crucial mistake. Albright discusses wave poetics and particle poetics separately, alluding to quantum mechanics that is, in terms of fundamental sub-atomic particles but does so under the impression that waves and particles are separate things. It is an essential principle of modern physics that every subatomic particle of both force and matter behaves as both a wave and a particle. This is particularly ironic considering he references the work of physicist John Gribbin, who quite clearly states in his book The Universe: A Biography that it is taken in given in physics that when we describe something as being both a particle and a wave that we do not mean it is sometimes a particle and others a wave, but that it behaves as if it were a particle and simultaneously as if it were a wave; we fail, as humans, to have any nonmathematical way of perceiving and comprehending what has been termed the wavicle. Furthermore, in discussing Ezra Pound, he defines the fundamental particles of literature (according to Pound) as symbols, images and vortices. However, each of these can be broken down into other components; symbols are often comprised of a selection of signs and signifiers, images can be broken down into component parts. The very definition of fundamental particles infers that they cannot be broken down further. Only his mention at the end of the text of signs as a now commonly considered fundamental particle of poetry comes close to an adequate description. Albright also embarrassingly reuses the phrase sub-electron, which is not the name of an actual particle; an electron is a fundamental particle. This leaves his knowledge of the science he is appropriating to be questionable, and leaves the reader wondering how we are to accept his conclusions as valid when they are based on an incomplete premise.

Daniel Shelley-Smith In relation to my own work, this text has actually been very valuable. It has pointed out to me key areas that I would like to highlight and focus on, and has given me a starting point with which I am satisfied. From Albrights text it seems clear to me that the most logical starting point for my own work is to elucidate on the duality of science and art. Albright and the comments of several other writers (with whom I have discussed my proposed project) give me the impression of a divide between the two disciplines in contemporary society, or to be more exact; there is a divide perceived by others where I see merely the two sides of a single coin. This, I feel, is very important to address. The success of any literary work lies in how realistic it becomes to the reader. Even the most outlandish and avant garde narratives and plots such as Kurt Vonnegut must be believable through naturalistic language, allowing the reader to accept the text and its meaning. In a similar way the science and the poetry in my collection must flow one into the other, so that the science and art become unified, and above all obvious to recognize as a single poetic entity. Following on from this I feel it necessary, having read Albrights work, to move away from the modernist perspective and ensure that its clear in my writing that the science subsumes the art, and not the other way around. Building on Pounds philosophy that the image should not be burdened by excess baggage and diluting metaphors I would like my collection to attribute specific importance to the subject of the piece, and ensure that the portrayal of the subject is not distorted by the writing process; essentially, that the subject dictates the poem, not the other way around. This is a danger I have encountered often in my own writing, and I believe it should be avoided. My poetry is to prize the science through the form of art, acknowledging art (specifically, poetry) for what it is; a medium of transposing and expressing the idea, and not (as the Modernists seem to imply) an ethereal entity in its own right. I would also like to do this paying strict attention to the idea of pre-text, text and post-text as discussed in Quantum Poetics, which I think will become a valuable tool for producing, evaluating and evolving my own work, as well as fitting perfectly within the purview of poetic representations of contemporary physics. One final thing I have taken from Albrights work that I would like to investigate in my own work is the idea of the fundamental particle of poetry. In Quantum Poetics I felt that this concept was incompatible with Albrights approach to the texts, and was labored with his misuse of physics terminology. It did not, in that context, feel like a natural appropriation, and as such the interpretation felt artificial and ultimately unsatisfactory. However, in my work I will be focusing directly on the physics through my own writing in the medium of poetry, and as such the concept of the fundamental particle and the fundamental particle of poetry will become much closer, inevitably being intertwined by the proposed projects context, and the research material I will be drawing on for both inspiration and critical analysis. Essentially, I would like to delve into those interesting areas that I feel Albright set up for study and then abandoned in an undeveloped state, as well as addressing all of the key areas with which I disagreed with his work in both premise and principle.