The Poetry of John Tyndall

John Tyndall (c. 1822-1893), is best known as a leading natural philosopher and trenchant public intellectual of the Victorian age, who spoke and wrote controversially on the relationship between science and religion. Far fewer people know that he also wrote poetry.

The Poetry of John Tyndall contains annotated transcriptions of all 76 of Tyndall’s extant poems, the majority of which have not been published before. The poems are complemented by an extended introduction, which explores what the poems can tell us about Tyndall’s self-fashioning, his values and beliefs, and the role of poetry for him and his circle. More broadly, this introduction addresses the relationship between the scientific and poetic imaginations, and wider questions of the purpose of poetry in relation to science and religion in the nineteenth century.