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dc.contributor.author	Albright, Daniel
dc.date.accessioned	2010-03-03T14:35:57Z
dc.date.issued	1996
dc.identifier.citation	Albright, Daniel. 1996. Yeats and science fiction. Bullan 2(2): 1-18.	en_US
dc.identifier.issn	1353-1913	en_US
dc.identifier.uri	http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:3710798
dc.description.abstract	The young Yeats spent some years editing the poems of William Blake, and Yeats inherited much of Blake’s contempt for science, Blake’s sense that Newton was the devil who murdered the living cosmos and substituted dead mathematical abstractions. For all his life Yeats felt hostile to the extreme objectivism of Newtonian physics; but as he grew older he read popularized accounts of Einstein’s work, and he came to believe that advanced scientific thought was starting to converge with Yeats’s own philosophical beliefs–Berkeleian and occultist. Yeats believed this partly because he misunderstood some of the ideas of recent physics. But scientists themselves were in fact trying to work toward a vision of reality congruent with poetry (Whitehead called Shelley an excellent scientist; Crookes considered that the ectoplasmic emanations from spirit mediums might represent a new state of matter). And in a certain sense Yeats was right: later developments in physics have shown that the act of measuring can actually influence the physical world, so that mind and matter are indeed a far more integrated system than Newtonian physics would allow. In the course of this paper I will look not only at Yeats’s philosophical writings but also at a number of examples from Yeats’s poetry in which scientific ideas, such as wave vs. particle constructions of reality, are prominent.	en_US
dc.description.sponsorship	English and American Literature and Language	en_US
dc.language.iso	en_US	en_US
dc.publisher	University of Notre Dame Press	en_US
dc.relation.isversionof	http://undpress.nd.edu/	en_US
dash.license	LAA
dc.title	Yeats and Science Fiction	en_US
dc.type	Journal Article	en_US
dc.description.version	Accepted Manuscript	en_US
dc.relation.journal	Bullan -Oxford-	en_US
dash.depositing.author	Albright, Daniel
dc.date.available	2010-03-03T14:35:57Z

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