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- Title
Flame far too hot: William Empson's non-Euclidean predicament.
- Authors
Price, Katy
- Abstract
William Empson's poem 'Letter I' (1928–35) appears to anticipate the black hole, using the idea of a dying star from which no light escapes as a metaphor for unrequited passion. Closer inspection of the Cambridge undergraduate context in which the poem was written, along with the other source materials incorporated besides Arthur Eddington in the poem, reveals the motivation behind Empson's playful engagement with the limits of what was possible under general relativity. Empson's attempt to follow the metaphysical example of John Donne, using the new cosmology of the 1920s, led him to explore an extreme astrophysical condition that Eddington had dismissed as absurd, and that still had an uncertain scientific status in the 1930s.
- Subjects
EMPSON, William, 1906-1984; ENGLISH poetry; ENGLISH poets; EDDINGTON, Arthur Stanley, Sir, 1882-1944; ENGLISH literature
- Publication
Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 2005, Vol 30, Issue 4, p312
- ISSN
0308-0188
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1179/030801805X64906