My neighbor, Glenn, is fond of asking math-folks that he meets the question "Is mathematics discovered or invented?" -- and when he asked the question of MAA lecturer William Dunham the response was one word, delivered with a smile, "Yes." The question of invention versus discovery -- which may apply to poetry or to mathematics -- is thoughtfully considered in "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction" by Wallace Stevens (1879-1955); here are a few lines from that poem.
from It Must Give Pleasure, VII by Wallace Stevens
He imposes orders as he thinks of them,
As the fox and the snake do. It is a brave affair.
Next he builds capitols and in their corridors,
An article by Jeff Gordinier, "For Wallace Stevens, Hartford as Muse," in the Travel Section of last Sunday's NY Times gives a gentle introduction to one of my favorite poets; the article also provoked me to escape for an hour into a rereading of selections from my copy of The Collected Poems (Vintage Books, 1990). Poems by Stevens (1879-1955) celebrate ideas and are, like pieces of mathematics, suggestive of a variety of situations. (Work by Stevens was featured in these earlier blog postings: 15 December 2010 (from "The Snow Man"), 4 May 2011 ("The Anecdote of the Jar"), and 13 May 2011 (from "Six Significant Landscapes"). Here, reconciling opposites, are two of the five sections of Stevens' "Connoisseur of Chaos" -- also from The Collected Poems.
This final section of "Six Significant Landscapes," by attorney and insurance executive (and poet) Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), playfully explores the limitations of rigid thinking.
Several of my early insights concerning the connections between poetry and mathematics grew from ideas presented by poet Jonathan Holden -- of whom interviewer Chris Ellis (in 2000) asked this question:
Ellis: You have drawn similarities between poetry and mathematics. Can you explain the association or similarity between poetry and math in a way the mathematically challenged can grasp?
Holden: The "poetry and mathematics" analogy was simply to demonstrate, for those with some mathematical sophistication, that both languages "measure" things.