The Universe in Verse

O Sweet Spontaneous: E.E. Cummings’s Love-Poem to Earth and the Glory of Spring

The ultimate anthem of resistance to the assaults on life. …

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Mushrooms: Cellist Zoë Keating Brings to Life Sylvia Plath’s Poem About the Tenacity of the Creative Spirit

“Our foot’s in the door.” …

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A Language for the Exhilaration of Being Alive: The Poetic Physicist Alan Lightman on Music and the Universe

“Nowhere is the joy of existence so apparent as in music… Intelligent life-forms have created a multitude of sounds that express their exhilaration at being alive.” …

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To the Young Who Want to Die: Roxane Gay Reads Gwendolyn Brooks’s Lifeline of a Poem

“The gun will wait. The lake will wait. The tall gall in the small seductive vial will wait will wait.” …

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The Beginning and the End: Robinson Jeffers’s Epic Poem About the Interwoven Mystery of Mind and Universe

“Pleasure and pain, wonder, love, adoration, hatred and terror: how do these thing grow from a chemical reaction?” …

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Consciousness and the Constellations: Cognitive Scientist Alexandra Horowitz Reads and Reflects on Robert Frost

“You’ll wait a long, long time for anything much to happen…” …

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Trees at Night: Rebecca Solnit Reads and Reflects on a Stunning Century-Old Poem by the Young Harlem Renaissance Poet Helene Johnson

An eighteen-year-old prodigy’s song of praise for the eternal consolation of trees. …

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Kosmos: Artist Dustin Yellin Reads Walt Whitman’s Timeless Hymn to Human Nature as a Miniature of the Universe

A song of praise for that place in us housing “the past, the future, dwelling there, like space, inseparable together.” …

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Atoms with Consciousness: Yo-Yo Ma Performs Richard Feynman’s Ode to the Wonder of Life, Animated

“Out of the cradle onto the dry land… here it is standing… atoms with consciousness… matter with curiosity… I… a universe of atoms… an atom in the universe.” …

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Octopus Empire: An Animated Poem

A playful and poignant what-if for the planet. …

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The More Loving One: The Science of Entropy and the Art of Alternative Endings

“If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving one be me.” …

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Dirge Without Music: Emmy Noether, Symmetry, and the Conservation of Energy (Amanda Palmer Reads Edna St. Vincent Millay, Animated by Sophie Blackall)

“Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you. Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.” …

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Singularity: An Animated Ode to Our Primeval Bond with Nature and Each Other (Toshi Reagon Sings Marissa Davis)

A song of praise for life and “the smallest possible once before once.” …

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Let There Always Be Light: Dark Matter and the Mystery of Our Mortal Stardust (Patti Smith Reads Rebecca Elson)

“For this we go out dark nights, searching… for signs of unseen things… Let there be swarms of them, enough for immortality, always a star where we can warm ourselves.” …

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Achieving Perspective: Trailblazing Astronomer Maria Mitchell and the Poetry of the Cosmic Perspective, with David Byrne

“Mingle the starlight with your lives, and you won’t be fretted by trifles.” …

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My God, It’s Full of Stars: An Animated Serenade to Hubble and Our Human Hunger to Know the Universe

“…so brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back.” …

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The Animated Universe in Verse, Part 1: The Evolution of Life and the Birth of Ecology, with Emily Dickinson

How flowers gave rise to life on Earth and made possible the human consciousness that came to see a world “thronged only with Music.” …

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How to Live with Our Human Limitations: Physicist Brian Greene Reads and Reflects on Rilke’s Profoundest Elegy

“Not because happiness exists, that over-hasty profit from imminent loss, not out of curiosity, or to practice the heart… But because being here is much, and because all that’s here seems to need us.” …

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On the Beach Alone at Night: Meshell Ddegeocello Reads Walt Whitman’s Ode to the Interconnectedness of Life

A song of praise for “all souls, all living bodies though they be ever so different… all nations, colors… all identities that have existed or may exist… all lives and deaths, all of the past, present, future.” …

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As If to Demonstrate an Eclipse: Comedian Chuck Nice Reads Billy Collins’s Ode to the Quiet Wellspring of Gratitude

…with a funny and poignant meditation on the personal gravity of gratitude and why being grateful is “one of the most powerful things that any one person can do.” …

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Being but Men: Astronomer Natalie Batalha Reads Dylan Thomas’s Cosmic Serenade to Trees and the Wonder of Being Human

“Children in wonder watching the stars, is the aim and the end.” …

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“I Go Down to the Shore”: Natascha McElhone Reads Mary Oliver’s Spare, Splendid Antidote to Melancholy and Personal Misery

Consolation for the waves of sorry from the waves of the sea. …

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Patti Smith Reads Emily Dickinson’s Pre-Particle Physics Ode to the Science and Splendor of How the World Holds Together

A rhapsody of wonder between the scale of atoms and the scale of minds. …

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Ode to Buttoning and Unbuttoning My Shirt: Poet Ross Gay’s Subtle, Stunning Meditation on Learning to Live and Learning to Die

In praise of practicing the inevitable through the improbable, the mundane moments when we are “as delicate as we can be in this life.” …

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Astronomy, Race, and the Unwitnessed Radiance Inside History’s Blind Spots

A poetic instrument for observing and redrawing the spectrum of privilege and possibility. …

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