LINES SENT TO ALFRED STIEGLITZ
By:
January 21, 2025
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.
And, steady as the gaze incorporate
Of flesh affords, we turn, surmounting all
With keenest transcience to that sear
arch-head, —
Expansive center, purest moment and
electron
That guards like eyes that must look always
down
In reconcilement of our chains and ecstasy
That crashes manifoldly on us as we hear
The looms, the wheels, the whistles in
concord
Tethered and welded as the hills of dawn
Whose feet are shuttles, silvery with speed
To tread and weave our answering
world, —
Recreate and resonantly risen in this dome.
— A fragment (of the “Atlantis” section of The Bridge) titled “Lines Sent to Alfred Stieglitz, July 4, 1923.”
Via the universal common denominator of curve and circle imagery, religious overtones have been attached to the wheels and gears of machinery. The spinning of every wheel in a machine imitates the “radiant field that rings / the / universe.” The circles inscribed by the machine also allow it to be related to the structure of the atom with its whirling electrons, as well as the solar system with its orbiting planets. Such correspondences serve to take the strangeness and novelty away from machinery. — from The Shared Vision of Waldo Frank and Hart Crane by Robert L. Perry.
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.