The poetics of enquiry in Ronald Duncan’s Man

Abstract

ABSTRACT In his cosmological epic Man, Ronald Duncan attempted to bridge the perceived divide between science and poetry. To do so, he had to find an aesthetically effective way to incorporate scientific data into poetry while using the form of the modernist long poem to replicate the insatiable processes of enquiry that he saw as defining science itself. Duncan’s dialogic engagement with science and scientists instigated in turn the creation of a new kind of reference work, The Encyclopaedia of Ignorance, sharing and promoting the same conception of science as Man.