"Science and Poetry," by Rachel Carson

Rachel Carson won the National Book Award in nonfiction for her best-seller, The Sea Around Us (1951). Her acceptance speech included the following sentences, laid out here as a poem for your reading pleasure:

The aim of science
is to discover
and illuminate truth.
And that, I take it,
is the aim of literature,
whether biography
or history or fiction.

It seems to me,
then, that there can be
no separate literature of science…
The winds, the sea, and the moving tides
are what they are. If there is wonder
and beauty and majesty in them,
science will discover these qualities.
If they are not there,
science cannot create them.

If there is poetry
in my book about the sea,
it is not because I deliberately
put it there, but because no one
could write truthfully
about the sea
and leave out the poetry.

+ Rachel Carson