Sir

Maurice Riordan's enjoyable, perceptive Words essay “The suspense of strangeness” (Nature 409, 457; 2001) provides much information and insight. I would like to add some comments on how scientific training, method and language can be valuable to a poet. The compacted prose of scientific writing is training for writing concise poetry — especially in formats such as haiku. The necessary sitting, thinking and composition required to write poems can be made easier by the strict disciplines of scientific training.

Riordan writes from a poetic standpoint rather than, as I do, from a poet-scientist perspective. The perception that poets — and the general public — have of scientists is different from creative scientists' own perception of themselves. My definition of a poet is a person who has poems published after critical review by an independent publisher. Unfortunately, this produces the question: what is a poem? The Bristol Polygon poets in the United Kingdom would reply: “A poem is a poem when the person producing it says it is.”

Some years ago, it was common in asthma conferences to schedule an afternoon to attempt to define asthma. The many discussions are crystallized by the comment “Asthma is like love: everyone knows what it is but no two people can agree the terms for its definition.” Scientists know that the problem of definition is not confined to poetry or literature.

The answer to Riordan's provocative question “Why doesn't a scientific sense of wonder translate readily into poetry?” is that it can be and has been translated, but suffers the defects of all translocations and the inherent difficulty in writing good poetry. As a scientist, I appreciate that scientific discoveries and laws provide an imperfect insight into phenomena comparable to that partial vision provided by poetry. While scientists attempt to reveal or unveil the natural philosophy of the Universe, we should all be aware of how ineffectually we individually achieve that grand aim. Poets are often similarly ineffectual. Both groups have a literature which manifests their collective effectiveness.

Scientific poets may be more common than Riordan suggests: Alex Comfort, for example, published reputable poetry. And there's no bimodal separation into poets and non-poets: Siegfried Sassoon wrote that the night before his platoon went into action, during the First World War, a third of the men became poets. In science we are familiar with the transformation of indifferent starters to excellent PhD graduates. I know of no evidence that the ratio of scientist-poets to scientists is any different from that of non-scientific poets to the non-scientific population.

However, creative scientists rarely have formal literary training. Accordingly, they are less likely than their pure poetic counterparts to be knowledgeable about what other poets have written. The standard of English language in many scientific publications is not high, offering little encouragement or example. Society's image of poets, or indeed of scientists, could make a scientist wary of being known as a poet for fear of reducing his or her scientific credibility. I believe that scientist-poets emerge from the woodwork with maturity or when they know their reputation is established.

Why should a reputable scientist bother about poetry? Gregory Corso (in Penguin Modern Poets volume 5, Cox & Wyman, London, 1963) explains: “I love poetry because it makes me love and presents me life ... But it does tell me my soul has a shadow.”

Scientists can be and are poets. They may provide language and perspectives that are interestingly different from the general populace of poets.