Sunday, June 06, 2010

John Lundberg: Physicist Decodes a Walt Whitman Poem

John Lundberg: Physicist Decodes a Walt Whitman Poem:

"--Nor the comet that came unannounced out of the north, flaring in heaven;
Nor the strange huge meteor procession, dazzling and clear, shooting over our heads,
(A moment, a moment long, it sail'd its balls of unearthly light over our heads,
Then departed, dropt in the night, and was gone;)

The origin of the above lines from Walt Whitman's poem 'Year of Meteors, 1859 '60' had always mystified scholars. In a poem memorializing real-life events it seemed an odd moment of exaggeration or fantasy. But a physics professor named Donald Olson has discovered that a rare scientific phenomenon occurring in New York that year almost certainly inspired the lines."

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