This essay focuses on the idea of the inner landscape as a source of artistic and creative freedom in the mind of the protagonist of the novel Fear of flying, Isadora Wing. Isadora wishes to be a writer but is hindered by the imposing wills of family, society, cultural norms and her own feelings of inadequacy. In order to free herself from these wills she goes through a cathartic journey which involves an extra-marital affair and culminates in finding peace of mind. This essay analyses how the novel portrays how one can be a creative force in spite of conflicting impositions that would stop one from being a writer.

John Curtis Holmes (August 8, 1944 - March 13, 1988) better known as "Johnny Wadd" (after the lead character in a series of related films), was one of the most prolific male porn stars of all time, appearing in about 2,500 adult loops, stag films, and pornographic feature movies in the 1970s and 1980s. Though he has passed on, the most famous part of Holmes is still present in the flesh (or thermal plastic elastomer, as it were). "The Original" is one of hundred of thousand mass-produced Holmes homages marketed all around the world and was molded directly from the legendary star. In response to this "toy", I became fascinated and somewhat disturbed by the implication of ownership and agency implied by the mass marketing and commercialization of an individual's actual body part. Further playing upon this co-opting of identity and commodification of the body, I placed an open call for artists to design their own piece for the John Holmes Prick Parade. The nude female form has long dominated as the artists' subject. The John Holmes Prick Parade hopes to give some visibility to the much neglected male apparatus. This is a move towards balancing gender equality within the anatomical object-ification of the art world. Before you is the grand culmination of this process, which began almost 70 years ago with the birth of a most "gifted" individual.

The aim of this thesis is to arrive at a characterisation of twentieth century poetry and science by means of a detailed study of the work of four poets who engaged extensively with science and whose writing lives spanned the greater part of the period. The study of science in the work of the four chosen poets, Hugh MacDiarmid (1892 – 1978), Judith Wright (1915 – 2000), Edwin Morgan (1920 – 2010), and Miroslav Holub (1923 – 1998), is preceded by a literature survey and an initial theoretical chapter. This initial part of the thesis outlines the interdisciplinary history of the academic subject of poetry and science, addressing, amongst other things, the challenges presented by the episodes known as the ‘two cultures' and the ‘science wars'. Seeking to offer a perspective on poetry and science more aligned to scientific materialism than is typical in the interdiscipline, a systemic challenge to Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) is put forward in the first chapter. Additionally, the founding work of poetry and science, I. A. Richards's Science and Poetry (1926), is assessed both in the context in which it was written, and from a contemporary viewpoint; and, as one way to understand science in poetry, a theory of the creative misreading of science is developed, loosely based on Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence (1973). The detailed study of science in poetry commences in Chapter II with Hugh MacDiarmid's late work in English, dating from his period on the Shetland Island of Whalsay (1933 – 1941). The thesis in this chapter is that this work can be seen as a radical integration of poetry and science; this concept is considered in a variety of ways including through a computational model, originally suggested by Robert Crawford. The Australian poet Judith Wright, the subject of Chapter III, is less well known to poetry and science, but a detailed engagement with physics can be identified, including her use of four-dimensional imagery, which has considerable support from background evidence. Biology in her poetry is also studied in the light of recent work by John Holmes. In Chapter IV, science in the poetry of Edwin Morgan is discussed in terms of its origin and development, from the perspective of the mythologised science in his science fiction poetry, and from the ‘hard' technological perspective of his computer poems. Morgan's work is cast in relief by readings which are against the grain of some but not all of his published comments. The thesis rounds on its theme of materialism with the fifth and final chapter which studies the work of Miroslav Holub, a poet and practising scientist in communist-era Prague. Holub's work, it is argued, represents a rare and important literary expression of scientific materialism. The focus on materialism in the thesis is not mechanistic, nor exclusive of the domain of the imagination; instead it frames the contrast between the original science and the transformed poetic version. The thesis is drawn together in a short conclusion.