Scientific poetry

Louâpre, Muriel, Marchal, Hugues and Pierssens, Michel. La Poésie scientifique, de la gloire au déclin, Épistémocritique, 2014, online publication on www.epistemocritique.org.

The book is a collection of articles following an international conference in Montreal, in 2010, during which the genre of scientific poetry was discussed. While the idea was quite accepted that this genre was supposed to have disappeared in the early 19^th century, academic project Euterpe recently enabled to find several examples of its continuity throughout the entire century. The book draws on this new discovery to question our current knowledge of the genre. The articles have been organised around a series of 5 questions through which the contours of scientific poetry appear redefined. While the first part is dedicated to framing the genre through statistics, and to the identification of its influence on contemporary works, the studies in the second one provide a picture of the disciplines explored by scientific poetry across Europe. The third and fourth parts respectively focus on the decline of the genre and the tensions that it created before its relative disappearance. Finally, though announced by the contemporary detractors of scientific poetry, the last part of the book questions the idea of such a decline by tracing its impact on the 20^th century through occurrences of its resurgence.