Physics and the Modernist Avant-Garde: Quantum Modernisms and Modernist Relativities

Developing a reading of modernist poetics centred on the three-way relationship between literature, modern physics, and avant-garde art movements, this book focuses on four key poets - William Carlos Williams, Mina Loy, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, and Wallace Stevens - whose lives crossed paths in 20th century New York.
In each of its four chapters, modernist art movements are found to shape the writers’ thinking about physics in relation to their work, as the book explores how science’s new ideas about measurement and how to visualize material reality provoked innovative poetic forms and images. From Einstein’s visit to New York City in 1921 to the impact of the atomic bomb, it traces the flow of ideas about physics through culture, linking the new physics with modern approaches to art found in Cubism, Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism.