Physics and the Modernist Avant-Garde: Quantum Modernisms and Modernist Relativities (Explorations in Science and Literature)

Developing a reading of modernist poetics centred on the three-way relationship between literature, modern physics, and avant-garde art movements, this book focuses on four key poets - William Carlos Williams, Mina Loy, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, and Wallace Stevens - whose lives crossed paths in 20th century New York. In each of its four chapters, modernist art movements are found to shape the writers’ thinking about physics in relation to their work, as the book explores how science’s new ideas about measurement and how to visualize material reality provoked innovative poetic forms and images. From Einstein’s visit to New York City in 1921 to the impact of the atomic bomb, it traces the flow of ideas about physics through culture, linking the new physics with modern approaches to art found in Cubism, Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism. Cover Contents Illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction Poetry and physics The age of revolutions: An overview of physics in the period 1905–45 Relativity theory The emergence of quanta Visualizing the atom The quantum revolution The New York avant-garde Four New York poets 1 Relative measure: William Carlos Williams’s Einsteinian poetics Cubist poetics in Spring and All (1923) Complex mathematics: Williams encounters Einstein Revising relativity: The second version of ‘St Francis Einstein of the Daffodils’ ‘The only reality that we can know is MEASURE’: Einstein in Paterson 2 Mina Loy’s energy physics Parody physics: Loy’s futurist satires Physics without parody: ‘Parturition’ (1914) Loy’s atomic spiritualism The man of electric vitality: Insel (1933–6) Back to the bomb: Rethinking atomic dissolution 3 The Baroness Elsa Von Freytag-Loringhoven’s physical systems Dada’s cult of indeterminacy Smashing Duchamp’s glass: The Baroness against the Dada scientists Quantum dissolution in Weimar Berlin ‘Life is science’: Finding order through science 4 The quantum poetics of Wallace Stevens and Max Planck The visualizability question and the poetic image The image in superposition: Stevens and Surrealism Stevens’s phantom problem ‘Invisible or visible or both’: An abstracted poetics Conclusion Appendix 1 – Parallel timeline Bibliography Index Developing a reading of modernist poetics centred on the three-way relationship between literature, modern physics and avant-garde art movements, this book focuses on four key poets – William Carlos Williams, Mina Loy, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and Wallace Stevens – whose lives crossed paths in 20th-century New York. This book explores how modernist art movements have shaped these writers' thinking about physics in relation to their work, demonstrating how science's new ideas about measurement and how to visualize material reality provoked innovative poetic forms and images. From Einstein's visit to New York City in 1921 to the impact of the atomic bomb, the author traces the flow of ideas about physics through culture, linking the new physics with modern approaches to art found in Cubism, Futurism, Dada and Surrealism.