EQUATION
By:
July 12, 2024
A (pro- or anti-) science-, mathematics-, technology-, space-, apocalypse-, dehumanization-, disenchantment-, and/or future-oriented poem published during sf’s emergent Radium Age (c. 1900–1935). Research and selection by Joshua Glenn.
![](https://www.hilobrow.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/d7hftxdivxxvm.cloudfront-1.webp)
a+ b + c = x
Hylas, the world’s percepted scene,
And man no less, the axle beam
Of mobile sense, exist but as
A notion in the mind of God.
And Columbine contributed,
Uttering a wise complaint:
Pierrot upon my stressèd breast —
The old moon in the new moon’s arms.
The subtle fury of a winter dusk;
A chord dissolving in the brain;
Portend
That knowledge and ideality
Are borne in the lapse of the menstrual
sea.
Earth is machine and works to plan,
Winnowing space and time;
The ethic mind is engine too,
Accelerating in the void.
— From Mutations of the Phœnix (1923), published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press.
The principle of relativity is used as the basis for an ingenious metaphysical conceit.
RADIUM AGE PROTO-SF POETRY: Stephen Spender’s THE PYLONS | George Sterling’s THE TESTIMONY OF THE SUNS | Archibald MacLeish’s EINSTEIN | Thomas Thornely’s THE ATOM | C.S. Lewis’s DYMER | Stephen Vincent Benét’s METROPOLITAN NIGHTMARE | Robert Frost’s FIRE AND ICE | Aldous Huxley’s FIFTH PHILOSOPHER’S SONG | Sara Teasdale’s “THERE WILL COME SOFT RAINS” | Edith Södergran’s ON FOOT I HAD TO… | Robert Graves’s WELSH INCIDENT | Nancy Cunard’s ZEPPELINS | D.H. Lawrence’s WELLSIAN FUTURES | & many more.