Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad
Poet involved
What happened
In New York, Helen Palsgraf sued the Long Island Railroad after she was injured by falling scales at a train station when railroad employees attempted to help a passenger boarding a moving train. The case reached the Court of Appeals, where Judge Benjamin Cardozo wrote a landmark opinion establishing the foreseeability test for proximate cause in tort law, ruling that the railroad could not be liable for an injury that was not a reasonably foreseeable consequence of its employees' actions.
Literary impact
While primarily a legal case, Palsgraf's bizarre chain of causation—a man's dropped package of fireworks leading to a woman's injury from falling scales—entered literary culture as a metaphor for the unpredictable consequences of human action. The case influenced the poetry of chance and contingency explored by modernist and postmodernist poets, from Wallace Stevens's meditations on randomness to the New York School poets who used urban accident and chain reaction as structural principles in their verse.
Source: Wikipedia
