Abstract

The poems in this collection explore the similarities and differences between the ways a scientist and a poet approach language. To better demonstrate the ways scientists use words and control meaning, I have adopted the persona of a scientist in many poems. Sometimes this persona is specifically Charles Darwin, while in other cases it is simply someone with a scientific sensibility. Along the way, a third voice, more closely resembling a poet's, appears to assert language's imaginative potential. The first section, consists of poems I have created out of a chapter from Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle , which deal with ideas of natural and artificial selection. The next section, ''Notebook M," explores the different relationships poetry and science have to metaphor, and the significant role metaphor plays in the theory of evolution in particular. "Zoobank" does the same for nomenclature, taxonomy, and anatomy, while the final section, "Old and Useless Notes," consists of poems I wrote before all the others. In a sense, these poems allowed me to write the later ones. The move from section to section is occasionally jarring because of slight differences in theme and more significant differences in style. These shifts are meant to reflect the form of a notebook. Darwin used his notebooks as a space for experiment, speculation, and practice, and I have attempted to approach this thesis in the same way. I hope the end result possesses, in some small way, the same spirit of daring possibility that so inspired me in the original.