Poetry and Cosmogony: Science in the Writing of Queneau and Ponge

In the middle of the twentieth century the French poets Raymond Queneau and Francis Ponge devoted themselves to the apparently quixotic task of reviving the dormant tradition of the cosmogonic poem. Queneau's Petite cosmogonic portative updates the verse cosmogony as it was written by Sceve and Du Bartas, drawing on the freshest scientific discoveries of its day and employing a ludic rhetoric indebted to Freud, Joyce and the Surrealists. La Seine and the "Texte sur l'electricite" are major components of Ponge's fragmentary cosmology. While looking back to Lucretius, they cite modern scientific texts extensively, in accordance with a strategy derived from Lautreamont. Poetry and Cosmogony offers the most thorough readings to date of these texts, analysing the ways in which they recast scientific material, and estimating the durability of the resulting poetry.