When Magic is Replaced with Science: Science Poems of David Morley
Journal Title: Ankara Üniversitesi Dil ve Tarih-Coğrafya Fakültesi Dergisi - Year 2018, Vol 58, Issue 1
Abstract
In his seminal work, The Golden Bough (1890), Scottish anthropologist James Frazer argues that the phases of belief systems in different parts of the world can be divided into three. For him, the Age of Magic, is replaced by the Age of Religion which is then replaced by the Age of Science. Recent interests in contemporary British poetry confirm Frazer’s prediction. Due to postmodernism, which sidelined mainstream attitudes in poetry, and the rising influence of science and technology on the society, science poetry came into being in the latter half of the twentieth century Britain with writers like Hugh MacDiarmid, Edwin Morgan, Robert Crawford, W. N. Herbert, Allen Fisher, Peter Redgrove, Lavinia Greenlaw and Pauline Stainer. Anglo-Romani poet David Morley is one of the pioneering figures of British science poetry. Morley’s science poems aim to take science out of the laboratory into the public arena. Trained as a biologist, Morley in his poems underlines how interest in magic has been replaced by science in today’s technological world and emphasises science’s inseparability from contemporary experience. In addition to this, Morley employs the scientific method in writing a number of his poems, such as his field-trip poems, which rely on scientific observation and the acquisition of data. Thus, Morley’s poems can be read as scientific experiments in terms of their methodology and the analogies they raise. For him, technoscientific discourse, progressively invading mankind’s life, is not likely to disappear from the poetic arena, hence its presence is continuously acknowledged in his poems. In this light, this study will analyse British science poetry as represented in David Morley’s poems, which besides underlining the replacement of magic by science, also shows the poet-scientist in action, while collecting data and creating a poem based upon his findings.
Authors and Affiliations
Merve SARI
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP630943
- DOI 10.33171/dtcfjournal.2018.58.1.32
- Views 106
- Downloads 0
Robert Browning as an Orientalist in Ferishtah's Fancies
Orientalism, according to Edward Said, is a Western fantasy which is not based on observation but on dreams, fantasies and assumptions of the West; and this makes it a fabricated construct. As Said argues in the introduc...
The Mediating Role of Interests towards Complex Stem Areas between Antecedants and Vocational Fit Criteria
Person-occupation fit has traditionally been studied within Holland's six occupational interest types framework; however the variance explained in fit criteria with assessments derived from this framework has remained li...
A Comparison of Item- and Context-Noise Models in Recognition Memory
Item-noise models (b; Shiffrin and Steyvers 145-166) assert that recognition memory performance depends on item information of other traces in the list. REM therefore proposes that performance decreases with increasing l...
Selected “Curse Motif” Stories from Indian Literature
Indian tales have an important role both in Indian literature and world literature. This geographic area has a huge tale accumulation, which enables us to have knowledge about their culture and way of life. The curse mot...
The Women Problem in the Works of Eliza Orzeszkowa
In the 19 century, social and political conditions in Europe caused the emergence of new literary movements. In Poland, these movements developed differently from Europe. Under these new emergent perspectives, the place...