If we came to know all about how it works, where is the space for poetry to fill?īut the reverse is true, argued Richard Dawkins in his 1998 book Unweaving the Rainbow: scientific discoveries just give us more to wonder at. What Keats worried about, of course, was that science would unpick the beauty of the natural world. “The more we find out about the world, the more questions we uncover,” she says. Poets can also help articulate the big questions about our universe and ourselves, Mort suggests. The poet Michael Donaghy described a poem as a ‘diagram of consciousness’… That’s a great way of putting it.” Helen Mort, whose first collection was shortlisted for a number of awards, says that “poetry is particularly well placed – perhaps even uniquely placed – to represent some of these experiential aspects of qualia.

In this respect, poetry speaks to the same urgency to know what makes us tick as neuroscience does. This makes sense: poetry spends a lot of time dancing around “ the hard problem” of how the physical stimuli we are exposed to end up as the subjective experience researchers call qualia. Now the rise of neuroscience, in particular, seems to be attracting a new generation. For years, big-name poets like Ruth Padel, Lavinia Greenlaw and Alice Fulton have drawn on scientific ideas. The poet wouldn’t be impressed with today’s poetry and science love-in. KEATS hated science, complaining that it “would clip an angel’s wings”, and that Newton had “destroyed the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to a prism”.

In their own way, poems hold a mirror to reality

Laboratorio by Simon Barraclough