A physicist recently complained to me that poetry doesn’t deal with science the way it deals with war: ‘No Wilfred Owen, no trenches, no battles.’

His words gave me pause. The relationship between poetry and science is not, after all, necessarily cosy. The uniquely great poet of science, Lucretius, had a sustained exhilarated sense of physical reality that gives his poetry its astonishing vividness. But his sensitivity to the sheer sensory impact of the natural world in all likelihood drove him mad. How could he cope with the indeterminacies, freak events, the unimaginable forces and scales of distance and time, that form part of our current understanding of the universe?

And what of the ‘hot mobile earth’ under his feet? The whole dynamic of our home planet in its geological cycles will flick us off inside a sliver of its life span, though not with any volition on its part. We may be speeding things up for ourselves, of course, by global warming. But, for the planet, that is no more than a temporary nuisance, an effect something like the common cold.

Or what of life itself? I don’t mean the narrow concept of human, or animal, life that is terminated by the cooling of body tissue; rather I’m thinking of the tough microbial stuff that goes on, that teems in ocean trenches or under the ice, and which, in all probability, flourishes in countless similarly inhuman conditions throughout the vast tracts of space. This is more what the quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger was getting at when he delivered his war-time lectures on What Is Life in 1943 at Trinity College, Dublin. He sought to isolate the essential principles of an elusive phenomenon that, once it got upand- running, has dodged the general law of entropy, shape-shifting through phylum and species down the aeons.

Do we exist in a world utterly at odds with the human? Well, I’m not going to make the call on that, not this morning. But as Aldous Huxley pointed out, Wordsworth would have taken a less benign view of Nature had he grown up in the tropics rather than the Lake District.

One poet troubled by the emerging picture of natural processes in his day was Tennyson. He refused to accept the mechanistic world-view implied, as he saw it by Lyell’s geology and by Darwin’s theory, that we are ‘magnetic mockeries’, ‘cunning casts in clay’:

Let Science prove we are, and then
What matters Science to men,
At least to me. I would not stay.

Huxley and Schrödinger, as it happens, took similar positions in relation to modern science. Faced with the enigmas of physics and biology, they were both drawn to the ancient insights of the Upanishads – ending up not a million miles away from Yeats’s visionary speculation that

The wandering earth herself may be
Only a sudden flaming word,
In clanging space a moment heard,
Troubling the endless reverie.

This isn’t far either, I suspect, from Wallace Stevens’ more occidental notion of the Supreme Fiction. ‘One must have a mind of winter’, Stevens writes, to behold the ‘Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.’ He opposes to the ‘poverty’ of our reality the ‘affluence’ of the imagination. And he compares the poet, who neither flinches at the plain sense of things nor shirks his fictive work, to the Hero engaged in a ‘war that never ends’ against the sky.