We all know, do we not, how radically dissimilar, even discontinuous (all right, discordant) poetry and science are. How unsettling then to come across this proposition – admittedly, by a poet (Diane Ackerman), not a biogeneticist, but a poet who has written lucidly and learnedly about various aspects of science: "Both science and art have the habit of waking us up, turning on the lights, grabbing us by the collar and saying Would you please pay attention!" What I mean to argue here is that poetry undertakes this work in an especially radical way, but one not unparalleled by the best of science. It wants nothing more or less than that we alter the whole way we view the universe. Think of Copernicus or Darwin or Einstein; and then think of, say, Robert Frost or Emily Dickinson or Shakespeare. Colleagues all.

Among the lamentable half-mistaken lessons I learned in high school (Paul Simon’s blunt lines come inevitably to mind: "When I look back on all the c**p I learned in High School, it’s a wonder I can think at all.") one had to do with poems and images. A poem, so I was confidently told, was an arrangement of words that frequently (almost always, until recently) rhymed. But the heart of the poem was its image. Poems were customarily allowed only one image, and it was the job of the poet to define and manipulate that image in the cleverest fashion imaginable. Poems, in short, were more or less images with fins and chrome. This was the Fifties, so fins and chrome were compliments.

It wasn't hard to find poems that fit the definition pretty well. This image of poetic images was one of those dangerous errors that is partly true, and therefore partly provable. Fortunately, its usefulness wears away quickly, once you escape from the anthology. It doesn't do a darned bit of good with Yeats or Wallace Stevens or even Shakespeare's sonnets, which have a nasty way of piling image on top of image, of complicating verbal pictures – that's what an image is, isn't it? that's why they call it an image, just like a photograph, isn't it? – with sound patterns and tactile images and Lord knows what all else.

It finally dawned on me one day (I won't say how old I was; I'm a little embarrassed to admit how long it took me to wise up) that poems were insidious little things that took as their work the complete unsettlement of the universe, the challenging of all the consoling presumptions you'd tinkered together over the years. Poems are, often in the quietest way possible (they've figured out, you're a more likely sucker if you're half asleep) complete revisions of the way you think. They have, at their disposal, a whole range of tricks, honed to a fine complexity over the centuries. But mostly they work with only two meager tools: language and imagery.

One problem with language is that it's so shopworn, used by everyone from Shakespeare to children singing nursery rhymes, constantly acquiring new meanings, new implications. That makes it a restless and often awkward tool. I can recall, once, sitting on a faculty committee charged with the work of writing some legislation. One of my engineering colleagues, frustrated by our efforts to find just the right words, lamented, "Can’t we just use algorithmic language?" He was not in the least mollified to have it pointed out that no such creature exists. Which, of course, is why computer programmers prefer numbers.

Still, that very multiplicity is, in its way, an advantage. Any word worth its salt (or, more to the point, worth its poem) means four or a dozen things. The poem's work is to try to unleash all of those meanings at once. Which is why poems are bad things to read when you're trying to relax yourself to sleep, and impossible things to read fast: they demand that you linger over almost every word, considering the possibilities the way chess champions are supposed to be able to do.

But language (along with its subsidiary pleasures, like sound and rhythm) is really just the raw material of the poem. What makes it a poem (as opposed, say, to a short op-ed piece) is the image. William Carlos Williams said once that:

It is difficult

to get the news from poems

yet men die miserably every day

for lack

of what is found there.

Williams was a doctor, in the slums of Northern New Jersey – no airy-eyed romantic. He knew what "news" is, and how rarely it is found, in the normal course of things, in poems. He also knew, all too painfully, what causes miserable death. But if you take "news" here as, itself, an image, then the proposition at least becomes conceivable. And the result is not the death but the misery, after all.

To the poet, the image – observed or imagined, or when things are working well, both at once – is the germ. To the reader, the image is something else. In fact, that's part of the heart of the matter: the image is something else, something unexpected, something unfamiliar, and maybe even (when the poem tackles one of those nagging Big Questions, like death or love or the nature of the universe) something unpleasant. All the poem wants you to do, after all, is look at everything – every darned single thing – in a new way. And the image is the lens it asks – no, demands that you look through (and entices you to look through, too, of course). Williams is a master of this; one of his poems demands that you look scrupulously, and in the end lovingly, at a brown paper bag being blown down a city street. Every poet has his or her favorite pallet of imagery; it's one of the things that makes for a unique poetic "style" or "voice."

But it may be with images that there are really only two kinds, the useful and the ineffective. No, not useful; necessary, the ones that nag and nag at your mind, as opposed to the ones you can't even remember, ten minutes later – the ones that change the world and the ones that just take up space. Read enough poetry and the images will stay, forming your vision. On a bright December day you will not be able to keep from remembering that:

There's a certain slant of light,
Winter Afternoons -
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes.

(Emily Dickinson)

A month or so earlier, fighting like mad to avoid thinking of age and mortality, still there will come creeping into your mind the thought that:

That time of year thou may'st in me behold,
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold.

(William Shakespeare)

And once you've made it again to the grey days of earliest March, you'll look out the car window at some unprepossessing field full of the

reddish

purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy

stuff of bushes and small trees

(William Carlos Williams)

and realize that, if you could only look hard and carefully enough you'd be able to see "the stiff curl of wild carrot leaf" as "Spring and All" triumphs again.

The end point of these maunderings is that what poetry intends is a kind of cognitive rearrangement, a restructuring (and no less than that) of the way you observe and understand the universe. But consider Warner Heisenberg’s mild-mannered formulation of the importance of Einstein’s General Theory:

It was among the self-evident presuppositions of science that space and time are two
qualitatively distinct schemes of order, forms of intuition, under which the world is
presented to us. . . Einstein had the uncommon courage to cast all these assumptions
into question, and he possessed the mental power to think out how, upon somewhat
different assumptions, one may also arrive at a consistent ordering of the phenomena.

There is something so insouciant about that formulation, the ease with which Heisenberg contemplates the disposal of fundamental "forms of intuition." I encourage you to look at some of Yeats’s poetry – he does this all the time. You’ve heard of the Second Coming, the final triumph of Good and Right and Justice? Look at his poem entitled "The Second Coming," and prepare for unsettlement. Or read MIT’s own Alan Lightman’s fine book, Einstein’s Dreams, and enter a marvelous exploration of the scientific mind playing with . . . metaphor. "What if time is square?" I recommend the book frequently to friends of mine who are, in fact, poets. But always with the acknowledgement that the author is an astrophysicist.

The ecologist and naturalist Edward Abbey puts my case this way:

Any good poet, in our age at least, must begin with the scientific view of the world;
and any scientist worth listening to must be something of a poet, must possess the ability
to communicate to the rest of us his sense of love and wonder at what his work discovers.

Or, closer to home, the head-note to the section of the MIT course catalog which lists the offerings of the School of Science: "Above all, science is elegant, beautiful, and mysterious; it ennobles the human spirit." My argument is really very simply made - replace the word "science" in that sentence with the word "poetry" and you have a reasonable label for, say, Keats’s Odes.

If poetry has one great advantage over science, it comes in the area of cost and portability. A good book of poems (and you can find a treasure trove of them, just two stops up the Red Line, at the Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Harvard Square) might cost $12, at the most. And it would surely fit in a pocket. No lab, no Defense Department grants to apply for or administer, no complex computer modeling to keep you up half the night, logged on to Athena. Just careful reading, careful looking, and hard thinking, about the fundamental nature of things. And no proven medical side effects either, although the truth is, for some of us at least, it is a tad addictive.

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