Not a whole lot more to add, really. This is a quote I’ve always seen quoted as an incomplete sentence, and in a breathless manner, like “should… have… sent… a… poet”. A google search basically just brings up people using said quote, and a bunch of pages about the Jodie Foster movie, Contact, which I’m fairly sure isn’t the origin.
It does sound like the summary of the punchline of an Alfred Bester story, “Disappearing Act.” The line wasn’t actually used, IIRC, but it’s possible the story inspired the line.
It’s indeed a line in the film Contact, based on the book by Carl Sagan, and breathlessly uttered by the character Ellie Arroway when she sees the alien world for the first time:
That’s probably your match. The line seems to have caught on, and you may have heard it in a different context.
For what it’s worth, according to IMDb, the exact line is also in the video game StarCraft.
While Bester’s story is probably not the origin, it’s a beautiful story (collected among his other extraordinary works in Virtual Unrealities: The Short Fiction of Alfred Bester). The actual line here is, “Send me a poet.”
Walter Cronkite used a similar line in his LP set “I Can Hear It Now,” in which he says something to the effect (in referring to the first manned space flights) “Those of us on earth wondered how it looked to the poet’s eye.”
I’m pretty sure I saw it before the Contact movie… I’m thinking in a Bloom County strip? And even then, it seemed to be a reference to something else. But every time I’ve seen it, it’s in a space context. Perhaps one of the early astronauts said it?
I first read it in an essay on the US space program, I’d guess 20+ years ago, I believe by an SF writer. Could have been Harlan Ellison.
Was it not in the book (1985)?
I think the exact quote, “they should have sent a poet”, is from Contact, but the general idea that the things encountered during space exploration are best suited to poetic description is common both in science fiction and among actual space people (by which I don’t mean Mork et al.).
Back at least as far as the Apollo program, and probably back to Mercury, there was talk that no professional laconic trained-to-report-the-facts-and-only-the-facts fighter pilot or scientist could possibly convey the awesomeness of being in space and seeing the Earth as a whole, without artificial nationalities and boundaries.
And I’ll bet a cookie that Ray Bradbury said something like this in one of his stories too. He was devastating against the “professional spaceman” mindset in The Martian Chronicles.
“Years ago, the novelist Norman Mailer was asked to sit on a television panel during the live broadcast of the first manned landing on the moon. While the rest of the panel talked in a heady fashion of the technological accomplishment represented by the landing, Mailer decried the total lack of poetry at the handling of the affair. An event that from the beginning of time was meant to fill our spirits with wonder and inspiration had been reduced to technological egoism and running descriptions of moon rocks.” - Allan Combs and Mark Holland’s Synchronicity.
Kinda sorta related - John Adams said during the American Revolution, “I must study politics and war, that my sons may have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy, natural history and naval architecture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, tapestry, and porcelain.”
Poetry and space exploration are wonderfully tied together in a moving James Dickey poem titled “Apollo,” which very concretely examines his reaction to the Apollo 8 mission.
Interestingly, here’s a .pdf I Googled of an article on “Space Poems” which I think was published in 1985. It contains excerpts from several poems on space exploration dated 1970 in the first two pages, and part of a Dickey poem from 1968 (I can’t tell if it’s the one described above) on the third page.
Perhaps more to the point, the article is all about the response of the artistic spirit to the beginning of space exploration:
Related sentiment from Jack Kerouac:
To Edward Dahlberg
Don’t use the telephone
People are never ready to answer it
Use poetry
(in Scattered Poems, c. 1971, according to cites around the 'net :dubious: )
From Nancy Freedman’s Joshua Son of None (1973):
“That kind of job [astronaut] is for the technician type without the imagination to be scared.”
“You’re wrong. What better place for a poet than space?”
In Roger Zelazny’s “A Rose For Ecclesiastes” (1963) they do indeed send a poet - to Mars in this case.
Well, I think it is pretty clear that we have a consensus: Poets can wake a zombie twice!
More to the point of the OP, though…
It seems clear that even if the idea preceded Contact by decades, that particular formulation of it is indeed from Contact. (By the way, I think the line was in Sagan’s novel even before the movie was written. Does anyone have a copy of the book to check?)
Google books doesn’t give any hits for “poet”, so I think its just in the movie.
Googling, a lot of the references to the phrase are pretty clearly taken from the film (they use more of the quote), so I’m pretty sure the film “Contact” from 1997 is the original source.
Yeah, everything ends up in porcelain eventually. 