6 - The Human Animal: Biological Tropes in Interwar Poetry

Summary

World of young living language! Fold

On vivid fold of changing green

In sapient shoot and lyric leaf,

Exact, appropriate, unseen!

It is full summer, fertile earth

Fulfils her rhythm: line on line

In seas of light and liquid gold,

Grey-silver olive, changing vine […].

Michael Roberts's ‘Earth, Impact’ (1936) has become something of an anchor point for those interested in relations between science and poetry in the 1930s. Alongside the poem's engagement with physics and geology, there is the biological imaginary represented by these lines (ll. 13–20), in which language has the fine structure of organic life, and reading is a kind of parasitic investment in that life (‘Where commentary ivy clings / In deep interstices of mind’ (ll. 23–24)). These metaphors put into practice the aesthetics articulated in Roberts's preface to New Signatures (1932), which compared scientific and poetic knowledge and technique. An interest in biology is something that Roberts shares with a circle of young writers in Cambridge and London, many of them significantly allied to Surrealism and informed about recent developments either by their education or by the popular scientific writings which are such a feature of the interwar period (see Bowler, 2009; Stableford, 1985). In this essay I will explore how three of these writers, Herbert Read, William Empson and W. H. Auden, as well as one predecessor, John Rodker, built on three developments in particular which seemed to have a bearing on the understanding of the human as animal: the emergence of endocrinology (the study of hormones); a fascination with the social life of insects; and the new concept of neoteny within evolutionary biology.