This book examines types of resistance in contemporary poetry to the authority of scientific knowledge, tracing the source of these resistances to both their literary precedents and the scientific zeitgeists that helped to produce them. Walpert argues that contemporary poetry offers a palimpsest of resistance, using as case studies the poets Alison Hawthorne Deming, Pattiann Rogers, Albert Goldbarth, and Joan Retallack to trace the recapitulation of romantic arguments (inherited from Keats, Shelly, and Coleridge, which in turn were produced in part in response to Newtonian physics), modernist...

"So many poems articulate either certainty or its opposite, nihilism. What I love...is that the speaker takes the time to change his or her mind; this is a poem that thinks...And what thoughts: goats, lutes, and shot glasses abound, as do intelligence and sly humor."--David Kirby, judge, James Wright Poetry Award "I imagine it was a matter of the sheer control, the precision of the descriptive language, the beautiful cadences. We are participants...standing at the shoulder of the poet in the deeper darkness before dawn as description gives way to meditation and thence to the more personal...

At a time when the Humanities are under threat, this book offers a defense of poetry within the context of growing interest in mindfulness in business, health care, and education.