The Convulsive Beauty of Cosmic Being: Where Science, Spirituality, and Poetry Collide

Gerard Manley Hopkins saw intense spiritual connections with nature and was able to integrate these connections into his work. Modernist poets were fascinated by, and often times appalled by, quantum theories about the building blocks of the universe. Their main goal was to create poetry that was grounded, present, and unadulterated by imprecise romantic notions. In distilling language down to its smallest units of meaning, either particulate images or wave-like structures devoid of subjects and objects, Modernists discovered that the objective correlative could only be achieved with a mixture of both forms (Albright, 1997). Contemporary poet Andrew Joron shares the multidimensional view of the Modernists and the intense spiritual connections of Hopkins, and describes such transitional awakenings as a “convulsive beauty of cosmic being” (Joron, 2008). This article explores the ways poets have used science and nature to infuse energy into their work.