The purpose of the session was to demonstrate that literature and science are not poles apart, as people sometimes imagine, but actually come together in our modern world. It was argued that poets are in fact closer to scientists in their way of thinking, in their sociology and in many of their preoccupations than previously thought. Poet-scientists have always existed, but, today, there is a growing band of poets – many of whom are not scientists – for whom science provides inspiration.

Poets, rather like scientists, tend to form small groups around a common aim or idea. Like scientists, they develop a language of their own and modes of expression they feel appropriate for a particular task. More than other writers, they seek a compact and sleek elegance of language, and they believe, just like physicists or mathematicians, that unnecessary words and secondary developments must be hacked away, leaving the structure of their creation standing in its purest form. Indeed, scientists and poets are so similar in many respects that stepping from one to the other is quite natural.

The session gathered together poets who write in English, in French, in German, in Italian, in Russian, in Spanish and in Catalan, and whose subjects range from mathematics, through physics, chemistry, biology, zoology and palaeontology to sociology. It even attracted poets who look on science from the outside, as a subject for them so far unexplored. It raised the question why some scientists must have access to poetry in order to sustain innovative research, and why many contemporary poets find unprecedented insights and inspiration in sometimes esoteric branches of science.

The session gave food for thought to all those who recognize that scientific communication does not stop with the business of writing and publishing scientific papers, or indeed that the only other option beyond that is some kind of vulgarisation. It was shown that there are many kinds of scientific writing, including the most challenging intellectually, which take place outside the sphere of scientific journals.