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Famous Scientific Poems by Famous Poets

These are examples of famous Scientific poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous scientific poems. These examples illustrate what a famous scientific poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).

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by Nash, Ogden
...kerchief after handkerchief; 
This cold you wave away as naught 
Is the damnedest cold man ever caught! 

Give ear, you scientific fossil! 
Here is the genuine Cold Colossal; 
The Cold of which researchers dream, 
The Perfect Cold, the Cold Supreme. 
This honored system humbly holds 
The Super-cold to end all colds; 
The Cold Crusading for Democracy; 
The Führer of the Streptococcracy. 

Bacilli swarm within my portals 
Such as were ne'er conceived by mortals, 
But br...Read more of this...



by Ginsberg, Allen
...lf.

Don't drink yourself to death.

Two molecules clanking against each other requires an observer to become 
 scientific data.

The measuring instrument determines the appearance of the phenomenal
 world after Einstein.

The universe is subjective.

Walt Whitman celebrated Person.

We Are an observer, measuring instrument, eye, subject, Person.

Universe is person.

Inside skull vast as outside skull.

Mind is outer space.

"Each on h...Read more of this...

by Service, Robert William
...Oh happy he who cannot see
 With scientific eyes;
Who does not know how flowers grow,
 And is not planet wise;
Content to find with simple mind
 Joys as they are:
To whom a rose is just a rose,
 A star--a star.

It is not good, I deem, to brood
 On things beyond our ken;
A rustic I would live and die,
 Aloof from learned men;
And laugh and sing with zest of Spring
 In life's exultant sc...Read more of this...

by Paterson, Andrew Barton
...'Twas in scientific circles 
That the great Professor Brown 
Had a world-wide reputation 
As a writer of renown. 
He had striven finer feelings 
In our natures to implant 
By his Treatise on the Morals 
Of the Red-eyed Bulldog Ant. 
He had hoisted an opponent 
Who had trodden unawares 
On his "Reasons for Bare Patches 
On the Female Native Bears". 
So the...Read more of this...

by Paterson, Andrew Barton
...t will bring me fame and fortune! In the happy days to be, 
Men of every clime and nation will be round to gaze on me— 
Scientific men in thousands, men of mark and men of note, 
Rushing down the Mooki River, after Johnson’s antidote. 
It will cure delirium tremens, when the patient’s eyeballs stare 
At imaginary spiders, snakes which really are not there. 
When he thinks he sees them wriggle, when he thinks he sees them bloat, 
It will cure him just to think of Johns...Read more of this...



by Meredith, George
...hivering from our dream. 
Then if we study Nature we are wise. 
Thus do the few who live but with the day: 
The scientific animals are they. 
Lady, this is my sonnet to your eyes....Read more of this...

by Sandburg, Carl
...ht, this bull-roarer who knows everybody.
“I write forty books, history of Islam, history of Europe, true religion, scientific farming, I am the Roosevelt of the Caucasus, I go to America and ride horses in the moving pictures for $500,000, you get $50,000 …”
“I have 30,000 acres in the Caucasus, I have a stove factory in Petrograd the bolsheviks take from me, I am an old friend of the Czar, I am an old family friend of Clemenceau …”
These hands strangled three fellow wor...Read more of this...

by Tebb, Barry
...brimming over

With adolescent passion.

Only analysis with its symmetries and asymmetries

Exactness and paradox, scientific as Heisenberg's

Principle of Uncertainty, yet various as the shades of Monet,

Eases me.

I think of those I have known and know no longer,

Who have died needlessly, disappeared irrevocably

Or changed beyond recognition.

I think of the bridge, river and streets

Of my Montmartre, gone under and made over

Into the grey utilities of tra...Read more of this...

by Masters, Edgar Lee
...My thanks, friends of the County Scientific Association,
For this modest boulder,
And its little tablet of bronze.
Twice I tried to join your honored body,
And was rejected,
And when my little brochure
On the intelligence of plants
Began to attract attention
You almost voted me in.
After that I grew beyond the need of you
And your recognition.
Yet I do not reject your memorial s...Read more of this...

by Ginsberg, Allen
...efore us unborn in nature? Is there
 a new thing under the Sun?
At last inquisitive Whitman a modern epic, detonative,
 Scientific theme
First penned unmindful by Doctor Seaborg with poison-
 ous hand, named for Death's planet through the 
 sea beyond Uranus
whose chthonic ore fathers this magma-teared Lord of 
 Hades, Sire of avenging Furies, billionaire Hell-
 King worshipped once
with black sheep throats cut, priests's face averted from
 underground mysteries in single tem...Read more of this...

by Sandburg, Carl
...m and then buy another nickel’s worth.
Newsboys shooting craps in a back alley have a fugitive understanding of the scientific principle involved.
The jockey in a yellow satin shirt and scarlet boots, riding a sorrel pony at the county fair, has a grasp of the theory.
It is the same as why boys go running lickety-split
away from a school-room geography lesson
in April when the crawfishes come out
and the young frogs are calling
and the pussywillows and the cat-tai...Read more of this...

by Cummings, Edward Estlin (E E)
...proud of his scientific attitude

and liked the prince of wales wife wants to die
but the doctors won't let her comman considers fr
ood
whom he pronounces young mistaken and
cradles in rubbery one somewhat hand
the paper destinies of nations sic
item a bounceless period unshy
the empty house is full O Yes of guk
rooms daughter item son a woopsing *****
colon h...Read more of this...

by Ashbery, John
...rivacy of this man who
"Dabbled in alchemy, but whose wish
Here was not to examine the subtleties of art
In a detached, scientific spirit: he wished through them
To impart the sense of novelty and amazement to the spectator"
(Freedberg). Later portraits such as the Uffizi
"Gentleman," the Borghese "Young Prelate" and
The Naples "Antea" issue from Mannerist
Tensions, but here, as Freedberg points out,
The surprise, the tension are in the concept
Rather than its realization...Read more of this...

by Wilde, Oscar
...Their scaffold of its prey.

The Governor was strong upon
The Regulations Act:
The Doctor said that Death was but
A scientific fact:
And twice a day the Chaplain called,
And left a little tract.

And twice a day he smoked his pipe,
And drank his quart of beer:
His soul was resolute, and held
No hiding-place for fear;
He often said that he was glad
The hangman's hands were near.

But why he said so strange a thing
No Warder dared to ask:
For he to whom a watcher's ...Read more of this...

by Service, Robert William
...ft.
Yet wait . . . By gosh! it seems to me that some of extra size
Were picked and put away to show the scientific guys."
Then deeply in a drawer he sought, and there he found a jar,
The which with due and proper pride he put upon the bar;
And in it, wreathed in queasy rings, or rolled into a ball,
A score of grey and greasy things, were drowned in alcohol.
Their bellies were a bilious blue, their eyes a bulbous red;
Their back were grey, and gross wer...Read more of this...

by Kipling, Rudyard
...and awful charges -- even so the she-bear fights,
Speech that drips, corrodes, and poisons -- even so the cobra bites,
Scientific vivisection of one nerve till it is raw
And the victim writhes in anguish -- like the Jesuit with the squaw!

So it cames that Man, the coward, when he gathers to confer
With his fellow-braves in council, dare nat leave a place for her
Where, at war with Life and Conscience, he uplifts his erring hands
To some God of Abstract Justice -- which no w...Read more of this...

by Wilde, Oscar
...all I, the last Endymion, lose all hope
Because rude eyes peer at my mistress through a telescope!

What profit if this scientific age
Burst through our gates with all its retinue
Of modern miracles! Can it assuage
One lover's breaking heart? what can it do
To make one life more beautiful, one day
More godlike in its period? but now the Age of Clay

Returns in horrid cycle, and the earth
Hath borne again a noisy progeny
Of ignorant Titans, whose ungodly birth
Hurls them again...Read more of this...

by Chesterton, G K
...squirm 
(If a may be allowed the term) 
From the writhing of the stricken Worm 
That died in seven towns. 
I see no scientific proof 
That this idea is sound, 
And I should say they wound about 
To find the town of Roundabout, 
The merry town of Roundabout, 
That makes the world go round. 

Some say that Robin Goodfellow, 
Whose lantern lights the meads 
(To steal a phrase Sir Walter Scott 
In heaven no longer needs), 
Such dance around the trysting-place 
The moonstr...Read more of this...

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