I’m married to a scientist and have spent a good proportion of the last twenty years orbiting various types of scientists while being very much not a scientist myself. For a long time, W H Auden’s famous line ‘When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes’ aroused in me a feeling of empathy. However, on reading the remark in context – in his 1962 lecture ‘The Poet and the City’ – I find myself at odds with Auden (‘At Odds with Auden’, a good title for a poetry chapbook or a volume of literary criticism). Auden described scientists as ‘the true men of action in our time, those who transform the world’. ‘Unfortunately,’ he went on, ‘poetry cannot celebrate them because their deeds are concerned with things, not persons, and are, therefore, speechless.’ I think for Auden the ‘dukes’ were technocrats, components, mere doers with empty titles. The shabby curate was the one doing God’s work. That’s not how I feel about scientists. 

Many years ago, I was at a gathering at the home of an esteemed atmospheric chemist –