Today, poetry and science are often considered to be completely separate career paths. However, that wasn't always the case. The mathematician Ada Lovelace and the physicist James Clerk Maxwell were both accomplished poets. Similarly, the poet John Keats was also a licensed surgeon. The combination of these disciplines fell out of favor in the 1800s. Recently, however, there has been a reappearance of interest among scientists in expressing their research through poetry, such as lyrics and haiku, as alternative ways to inspire others with their findings.
"Poetry is a great tool for questioning the world," says Sam Illingworth, a poet and a geoscientist who works at the University of Western Australia. Through workshops and a new science-poetry journal, called Consilience, Illingworth is helping scientists to translate their latest results into poems that can attract appreciation from those outside of their immediate scientific field.
Stephany Mazon, a scientist from the University of Helsinki, participated in one of Illingworth's workshops where she and fellow scientists were tasked with writing haikus that highlighted water, a common theme in their research. "It was a lot of fun, and surprisingly easy to write the poem," Mazon says. She plans to continue writing. "We do harm ourselves to think that scientists can't be artistic and that art can't be used to communicate scientific ideas," Mazon says.
That viewpoint is echoed by Illingworth, who thinks science communication initiatives are too often dominated by public lectures with their hands-off PowerPoint slides. "Actually, when science communication involves writing and sharing poems, it invites a two-way dialogue between experts and nonexperts," he says. Scientist-poet Manjula Silva, an educator at Imperial College London, agrees, noting that poetry simplifies complex scientific concepts into language that everyone can understand.
Scientists and poets are both trying to understand the world and communicate that understanding with others. The distinction between scientists and poets is less than people might think. We're all just people with hopefully really interesting things to say and to share.