Edith Sitwell's atomic bomb poems: Alchemy and scientific reintegration

Modernism - Modernity

Volumn 9, Issue 4, 2002, Pages 605-633

  Morrisson, Mark ^a,b  

^a Department of English ^*

^b PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 61149601081     PISSN: 10716068     EISSN: 10806601     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/mod.2002.0062     Document Type: Review

References (22)

1. See Milorad Mladjenovi, The Defining Years in Nuclear Physics, 1932-1960s (Philadelphia: Institute of Physics Publishing, 1998), 65-9;
2. Margaret Gowing, Britain and Atomic Energy 1939-1945 (New York: Macmillan, 1964), 29;
3. and Bruno Latour, Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 80-112. Grateful acknowledgment is made to the Estate of Edith Sitwell for permission to quote from her unpublished notebooks and letters, and to the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the University of Texas at Austin, for permission to use the Edith Sitwell Collection.
4. Tom Wilkie, British Science and Politics since 1945 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 7.
5. Edith Sitwell read John Hersey's Hiroshima (1946, originally published in the New Yorker) and copied passages from Hersey and from bomb reportage in the Daily Mail, Daily Express, Scottish Sunday Express, and other newspapers. John Langdon Davies's article, "Atom Bombs: Some Dread New Facts" (Daily Mail, 2 September 1946), conjured nightmarish visions that Sitwell copied into her undated notebook 78 of "subhuman" Japanese babies born centuries in the future due to radiation damage. Davies also described a radioactive dust dropped from planes onto unsuspecting towns at night to create "hidden biological results" and expressed the fear that "200 aeroplanes each with an atomic bomb could sterilise or cause chromosome injury to the entire population of Britain." The section called "Three Poems of the Atomic Age" first appeared in Edith Sitwell, The Song of the Cold (New York: Vanguard, 1948).
6. See John Ower, "Edith Sitwell and the Atomic Bomb," American Benedictine Review 27 (1976): 428, n. 2; hereafter abbreviated as "ES." Even recent work still focuses primarily on the religious vision without exploring any of the scientific contexts of the poem.
7. See, for example, Pamela Slateliggett, "The Vision of Edith Sitwell: Prophecy and Sensation in Her World War II Poetry," Language and Literature 22 (1997): 93-102.
8. Evelyn Fox Keller, Refiguring Life: Metaphors of Twentieth-Century Biology, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 48; hereafter abbreviated as RL.
9. See Bruce Clarke, Dora Marsden and Early Modernism: Gender, Individualism, Science (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 36-8, 161-71.
10. Taken Care Of: The Autobiography of Edith Sitwell (New York: Atheneum, 1965), 168-9.
11. Sitwell possessed two of Einstein's texts in translation: Investigations on the Theory of the Brownian Movement, ed. R. Furt, trans. A. D. Cowper (London: Methuen, 1926) and Relativity: the Special and the General Theory: a Popular Exposition, trans. Robert W. Lawson (London: Methuen, 1920). While writing the atomic bomb poems she was taking some notes on Cambridge astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington's popular text, The Nature of the Physical World (1928), and a few years later she made a note on the back of one of her notebooks to buy Eddington's Fundamental Theory (1948).
12. See Linda Dalrymple Henderson, Duchamp in Context: Science and Technology in the Large Glass and Related Works (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998); hereafter abbreviated as DC.
13. Also see Alex Keller, The Infancy of Atomic Physics: Hercules in His Cradle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), chapter 6. In my work-in-progress, The "Newer Alchemy" and the Ownership of Atomic Theory: The Cultural Work of Alchemy in Atomic Physics, Hermeticism, and Literature, 1890-1939, I contend that alchemy was the dominant metaphor for atomic physics and chemistry during this period.
14. See Evelyn Fox Keller, Secrets of Life, Secrets of Death: Essays on Language, Gender, and Science (New York: Routledge, 1992) for a psychoanalytic reading of the procreative metaphors that helped enable the construction of atomic weapons at Los Alamos.
15. The Collected Poems of Edith Sitwell (New York: Vanguard, 1954), 366; hereafter abbreviated as CP.
16. See Ernst Haeckel, The Riddle of the Universe at the Close of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Joseph McCabe (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1900); hereafter abbreviated as RU. I am working from the first English edition of McCabe's translation. Sitwell's copy of the book was a later edition of the same translation, published in London by Watts & Co., 1929. Hers was the fourth impression, dated April 1937.
17. Pierce C. Mullen, "The Romantic as Scientist: Lorenz Oken," Studies in Romanticism 16, no. 3 (Summer 1977): 391-6; hereafter abbreviated as "RS."
18. Kenneth L. Caneva, "Physics and Naturphilosophie: A Reconnaissance," History of Science 35, no. 1 (1997): 38. Also see "RS."
19. There were certainly more recent challenges than Naturphilosophie to mechanistic philosophies in the modernist period. For instance, it is hard to imagine that Sitwell was unaware of the work of Henri Bergson and the vitalist philosophy that was at its height from the late nineteenth century through roughly the 1920s. See Sanford Schwartz, "Bergson and the Politics of Vitalism," in The Crisis in Modernism: Bergson and the Vitalist Controversy, ed. Frederick Burwick and Paul Douglass (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 277-305. I don't find direct evidence that Bergsonianism played a role in Sitwell's thinking in the 1940s. Instead, it appears that Oken's attack on mechanistic sciences and his highly idiosyncratic and imaginative attempt to weave together a system that would unify biology, physics, geology, and virtually all other sciences, captured Sitwell's fancy in a way that Bergson may not have. Sitwell owned a copy of Bergson's Creative Evolution (1907), but her 1959 reprint was published well after the composition of the bomb poems.
20. Oken begins by making a number of claims about the mathematical nature of the universe: 2. The universe or world is the reality of mathematical ideas, or, in simpler language, of mathematics. 3. Philosophy is the recognition of mathematical ideas as constituting the world, or the repetition of the origin of the world in consciousness. 4, 5. Spirit is the motion of mathematical ideas. Nature, their manifestation. 6. The philosophy of Spirit is the representation of the movements of ideas in consciousness. [EP, 1]
21. Stephen Jay Gould has written one of the most probing reassessments of Burnet in recent years, arguing against a vision of history that only considers the "progress" of science: "the rationale for such a simplistic one-way flow from observation to theory has become entirely bankrupt. ... Scientists are human beings, immersed in culture, and struggling with all the curious tools of inference that mind permits - from metaphor and analogy to all the flights of fruitful imagination that C. S. Pierce calls 'abduction.'" Stephen Jay Gould, Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 6-7; hereafter abbreviated as TA. Gould explains that, in this theory of history, "Thomas Burnet, villain by taint of theological dogmatism, wrote his Sacred Theory of the Earth in the 1680s. The first hero, James Hutton, worked exactly a century later, writing his initial version of the Theory of the Earth in the 1780s. Charles Lyell, second hero and codifier of modernity, then wrote his seminal treatise, Principles of Geology, just fifty years later, in the 1830s" (TA, 4). He points out that, by the early nineteenth century, geologists like Lyell had come to ridicule Burnet's scientific methods for their fancifulness, religious dogma, and lack of compelling scientific evidence, yet Lyell's sense of "scientific history" is the very kind against which Gould argues. Of Burnet's Sacred Theory, Lyell wrote: Even Milton had scarcely ventured in his poem to indulge his imagination so freely in painting scenes of the Creation and Deluge, Paradise and Chaos, as this writer, who set forth pretensions to profound philosophy. He explained why the primeval earth enjoyed a perpetual spring before the flood! Shewed how the crust of the globe was fissured by "the sun's rays," so that it burst, and thus the diluvial waters were let loose from a supposed central abyss. Not satisfied with these themes, he derived from the books of the inspired writers, and even from heathen authorities, prophetic views of the future revolutions of the globe, gave a most terrific description of the general conflagration, and proved that a new heaven and a new earth will rise out of a second chaos - after which will follow the blessed millennium. [PG, 1: 37-8; italics in original] So why would Sitwell include both Burnet and Lyell as building blocks for the same poem? I would argue that her vision of the history of scientific "progress" is more like Gould's than Lyell's. And, beyond even Gould's understanding of the embeddedness of science in the cultural texture of its day, Sitwell seems to have seen that the imaginative resources of the past can be brought to bear upon the present to help revise scientific emphasis.
22. Thomas Burnet, The Theory of the Earth: Containing an Account of the Original of the Earth, and of All the General Changes Which It Hath Already Undergone, or Is to Undergo, Till the Consummation of All Things (London: R. Norton for W. Kettilby, 1684-90), 1: preface 3; hereafter abbreviated as TE.