Verse and its Sciences, 1880-1971: William Carlos Williams, Laura Riding, George Oppen, I. A. Richards and Veronica Forrest-Thomson

Abstract

From experiments conducted at the Stanford Literary Lab to recent calls for an “ordinary science’ of literary criticism, researchers in English have increasingly looked to the sciences to provide new frameworks for textual analysis. But the knowledge exchange between scientific explanation and literary thinking has a long-standing and largely untold history, dating back to turn-of-the-century America and Europe. Entitled Verse and its Sciences, 1880-1971, my Ph.D. thesis tracks the extraordinary amount of intellectual activity devoted to producing a scientific account of poetry, tracing the use of measurement technologies, the desire for an exact explanatory language, the influence of the scientific method and the impact of the neurological sciences on the study of poetry. This thesis is thus a historical inquiry into what I call the ‘normal science’ of poetic criticism, presenting four studies that map how newly operative scientific techniques impacted the field of poetics. In so doing, I explore the politics of scientific knowledge, showing how a range of racialised, gendered and political ideologies informed these techniques. I then argue that this scientific criticism impacted the epistemology and politics of twentieth-century poetry. My first chapter situates William Carlos Williams’s theory of ‘measure’ against contemporaneous attempts to measure poetry scientifically. The second considers poetry written by Laura Riding as an aesthetic response to the emergence of a new kind of scientifically-informed literary critic, one she regarded as an overly masculine and professionalised literary ‘expert’. The third works through George Oppen’s unpublished notes about mathematics, which I read as ethical interventions into debates about the emergence of the scientific method in the field of poetics. My final chapter examines I. A. Richards’s criticism from the 1920s and 1950s alongside the poetry of Veronica Forrest-Thomson, positioning Richards’s work on linguistic ‘instruments’ as one discrete moment in the development of the ‘normal science’ of poetic criticism. I also argue that Forrest-Thomson re-works Richards’s concept of an ‘instrument’ to conceive of her verse—and the history of twentieth-century poetry with it—as an epistemological instrument. By focusing on the technical and compositional verse practices of these four poets, my thesis clarifies how Williams, Riding, Oppen and Forrest-Thomson thought their verse could deliver a unique form of knowledge—a verse-science.