In 1864, when he was in his early 40s, the sceptical John Tyndall, physicist and emerging public intellectual, attended a séance. He wrote an amusing account of the episode in The Reader magazine, in which he reported that the spirits had dubbed him ‘The Poet of Science’.1 In this guise he preceded his friend Alfred Tennyson, who was not so described until after his death.2 Yet the meaning of ‘poet’ here needs qualifying. It was the vivid language Tyndall used in his lectures and books that gave him this status, not least in his writings about mountains and landscape. As W. T. Jeans wrote in 1887: ‘I do not know that he has ever written poetry, but he is certainly a poet in the fire of his imagination and in his love for all the forms of natural beauty.’3 Few people were aware that Tyndall did indeed write poetry.