SOURCE: "The Poetry Lab: Science in Contemporary American Poetry," in New England Review and Bread Loaf Quarterly, Vol. XII, No. 4, Summer, 1990, p. 336-48.

In the following essay, High surveys various responses and approaches to science in modern American poetry.

We have to return to some measure, but a measure consonant with our time and not a mode so rotten that it stinks.

—William Carlos Williams, "On Measure,"

Selected Essays.

In James Merrill's poem, "Mirabell's Books of Number," one of the spirits of the Ouija board tells "JM" that if he wants to achieve "a breakthru," he must write "poems of science." Merrill writes in response:

Poems of Science? Ugh.
 The very thought. To squint through those steel-rimmed
 Glasses of the congenitally slug-
 Pale boy at school, with his precipitates,
 His fruit-flies and his slide rule? Science meant
 Obfuscation, boredom—; which, once granted,
 Odd lights came and went inside...