Engineering the ideal: applied modern poetics as applied modern science

Abstract

ABSTRACTMany scholars have traced the influences of theoretical science in modernist poetry. However, at the beginning of the twentieth century western audiences were principally enamoured of the applied sciences (or engineering) and especially the ideal of efficiency. The principles and processes of engineering permeated modernism, including its poetry, and, accordingly, the ‘science’ of modernist poetry is often an applied science. Specifically, Imagist and Objectivist poets implemented processes of optimisation and systematisation, which dramatise the iterative improvements that characterised the contemporaneous Efficiency Movement. That movement’s exemplar, Frederick Winslow Taylor, is remembered for conforming factory labour and labourers to exacting empirical ideals, leading this study to question the social repercussions of perfectly ‘efficient’ poems. However, poets H.D. and Charles Reznikoff actually disperse this impracticable ideal through their process-oriented forms. Thus, the modernist poetry inspired by the applied sciences revolves around scientific ideals, but it ultimately emphasises their fiction.