Science, Technology, and Emily Dickinson

Extract

Blake cursed “the single vision and Newton's sleep”. Thomas Hood delineated the effects of industrialization with indignant pity. The Georgians, in their own more limited fashion, carried on the good work with poems like Gordon Bottomley's To Iron-Founders and Others. But today an enthusiastic ode to an aeroplane propeller or to the hypothetical explosion of the universe would arouse no surprise, and it is generally accepted that whether a writer sees science and its technological offspring as a juggernaut or as a beaming sunrise has no direct bearing on the value of his work.