From large-scale quantitative studies in the digital humanities to AI-generated poetry, scientific reading seemingly reigns supreme. However, these reading practices preceded, and often shaped, modern literary criticism and the rise of close reading. The Search for a Science of Verse restores this history, tracing the unruly and deeply political attempts to fashion a scientific account of poetry from 1880 onwards. It also investigates a set of modern poets, from Laura Riding to Veronica Forrest-Thomson, who thought about how their verse offers a form of knowledge not reducible to scientific explanation. It gives an account of the singularity of poetic thinking in their work, which actualises instances of meaning-making that prioritise the singular over the rule-governed. The Search for a Science of Verse is thus a historical inquiry into how techno-scientific reason sought to exert its full domination over the poetic imagination—and how that imagination, in turn, responded.

'Christian R. Gelder’s erudite and limpid study of aspirations toward a science of verse provides an intellectual history and a critique of ideology that should be of great interest to scholars of modernist poetics - but it also gives us much more. By showing how poets not only went beyond but worked through this positivist program, Gelder makes a dialectically compelling case for the specific forms of knowledge only poetry can construct.'

Nathan Brown - Centre for Expanded Poetics, Concordia University

'Christian R. Gelder’s account of the modernists who wanted to put poetics on a scientific footing - and the ways their own poems resisted them - is fascinating. The accurate, objective measurement of poetic effect, he shows, was more than a cranky dream of linguistic programmability; it became a significant creative spur for Williams, Riding, Oppen and Forrest-Thompson, and a touchstone for I. A. Richards. This history of the scientific aspirations behind close reading and literary labs is also a subtle and discerning account of the poems and their poets.'

Peter Howarth - Queen Mary, University of London