Physics and the Modernist Avant-Garde

Rachel Fountain Eames is an academic and creative writer who holds a PhD from the University of Birmingham, UK, as has published work on 19th- and 20th-century literature, modern visual art, and science. She can be found on Twitter @rfeames.

Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction

Poetry and Physics
The Age of Revolutions: An Overview of Physics in the Period 1905-1945
Relativity Theory
The Emergence of Quanta
Visualizing the Atom
The Quantum Revolution
The New York Avant-Garde
Four New York Poets
Relative Measure: William Carlos Williams’s Einsteinian Poetics
Cubist Poetics in Spring and All (1923)
Revising Relativity: The Second Version of ‘St Francis Einstein of the Daffodils’
‘The only reality that we can know is MEASURE’: Einstein in Paterson
Mina Loy’s Energy Physics
Parody Physics: Loy’s Futurist Satires
Physics without Parody: ‘Parturition’ (1914)
Loy’s Atomic Spiritualism
The Man of Electric Vitality: Insel (1933-1936)
Back to the Bomb: Rethinking Atomic Dissolution
the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven’s Physical Systems
Dada’s Cult of Indeterminacy
Smashing Duchamp’s Glass: The Baroness Against the Dada Scientists
Quantum Dissolution in Weimar Berlin
‘Life is science’: Order Through Science in the Baroness’s Later Poetry
The Quantum Poetics of Wallace Stevens and Max Planck
The Visualizability Question and the Poetic Image
The Image in Superposition: Stevens and Surrealism
Stevens’s Phantom Problem
‘Invisible or visible or both’: An Abstracted Poetics

Conclusion
APPENDIX 1 – Parallel Timeline
Bibliography