The Search for a Science of Verse, 1880 to the Present

Christian R. Gelder is a Research Fellow in Literature at Macquarie University, Sydney. His work has appeared in Modernism/modernity, Literature and Medicine, Psychoanalysis and History, The Cambridge Quarterly, Australian Humanities Review and elsewhere. With Robert Boncardo, he is the co-author of Mallarmé: Rancière, Milner, Badiou (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018).

• Preface: the normal scientific study of poetry; 1. William Carlos Williams, measurement and the origins of distant reading; 2. Laura Riding's exactitude; 3. The method wars; 4. The birth of close reading: instruments in I. A. Richards and Veronica Forrest-Thomson; Coda: machine learning and the history of style.

'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