Alfred Noyes - The Torch-Bearers

Noyes' ambitious epic verse trilogy The Torch-Bearers — comprising Watchers of the Sky (1922), The Book of Earth (1925) and The Last Voyage (1930) — deals with the history of science. In the "Prefatory Note" to Watchers of the Sky, Noyes expresses his purpose in writing the trilogy:

This volume, while it is complete in itself, is also the first of a trilogy, the scope of which is suggested in the prologue. The story of scientific discovery has its own epic unity — a unity of purpose and endeavour — the single torch passing from hand to hand through the centuries; and the great moments of science when, after long labour, the pioneers saw their accumulated facts falling into a significant order — sometimes in the form of a law that revolutionised the whole world of thought — have an intense human interest, and belong essentially to the creative imagination of poetry. It is with these moments that my poem is chiefly concerned, not with any impossible attempt to cover the whole field or to make a new poetic system, after the Lucretian model, out of modern science.