Portrait of Charles Percy Snow (1905-1980), English author, physicist, and diplomat. Undated photograph. — Image by © Bettmann/CORBIS
The book Two Cultures was based on a speech delivered by the English physicist C.P. Snow in the late 1950’s. While there was considerable controversy at the time, and later, there is little evidence that work in the humanities has moved to bridge the continental drift between the two types of discipline. For poets, the Two Cultures gap is increasingly wide, with the subjects of most poems confined to flowers, streams, love, death, loss — valued emotional abstractions, but increasingly marginalized in a digital world that some poets eschew as a badge of honor.
