Agon: poetry’s resistance to the mathematisation of reality (1920s-1960s)
Keywords: Michael Roberts
Marianne Moore
Poetry
Physics
Yeats
Empson
Charles Olson
Mathematical Logic
Mathematics
modernism
Scientific realism
Riemann
Laura Riding

The thesis examines the interactions between British and American poetry and mathematics, in their various forms, from the late 1920s to the 1960s. The period bears witness to an unprecedented engagement with mathematics, principally in the forms of poetic images and metaphors, ranging from responses to mathematical physics to mathematical philosophy to pure—what has recently come to be known as ‘modernist’—mathematics. The thesis investigates the complex ways in which mathematical terms function in the meaning-making procedures of poems and explores the wider intellectual and cultural forces animating the phenomenon.
The first chapter explores references to mathematics by an earlier generation of poets. Their poems retain an almost pre-Victorian faith in the transcendental perfection of numbers and shapes. The chapter also introduces the more sophisticated philosophies of mathematics of the time, which were based on latest developments in the various branches of mathematics. The thesis studies writers either trained in or intimately familiar with these developments and the discourses surrounding them. In various ways, mathematics comes to play a crucial role in the writings of these poets, namely, William Empson, Michael Roberts, Laura Riding, and Charles Olson. Nearly all the poems discussed, and by extension all the chapters, compare and contrast poetry and mathematics as ways of speaking about the world.
The second chapter, featuring Empson, is on the different modes of knowledge and experience in mathematics and poetry. I compare mathematical tensors with poetic images, mathematical with poetic paradoxes, mathematical limits with poetic metaphors, and non-Euclidean shapes with discursive prose. The third chapter, on Roberts and Empson, explores the fate of love and passion in the poetry of rational and technological civilisation. In his early poems, Roberts obsessively modifies the semantic fields of a particular set of words. Through semantic re-appropriation, words reduced to strict mathematical denotation are re-made as sensuous and full. Empson’s “Letter V”, on the other hand, tries to describe a lover in mathematical language, asking to be read as a symptom of alienation. The final chapter examines the connections between the word and truth in the poetry of Riding and Olson. For the early Riding, truth lies in the intellectual part, the definition, of words whereas for Olson, it lies in the physical part, the sound. To define their philosophies of language, Riding ironizes mathematical Platonism whilst Olson affirms the non-Euclidean geometry of Riemann. All the poets studied regarded mathematical poetry as essential to achieving their peculiar ends.
The thesis questions a broad consensus in the incipient field of modernism and mathematics, amongst both literary and mathematical historians, that literature and mathematics in the period undergo a ‘convergent evolution’, amiably informing one another. I argue that the greater issue at stake is in fact one of authority. Writing around the middle of the century, poets in this thesis generally recognise the master discourse of their time to be science and broadly agree it to be unwise to only regard as true a mathematical account of reality. Their poetry thus always acquires an implicit or explicit attitude of defense and shows their individual mode of truth-telling as unique and essential. Empson and Roberts are concerned mostly with the relationship between semantics and phenomenology; to Riding and Olson, the stakes are metaphysical.