A summertime gift book that I have much enjoyed reading is Love & Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality by Edward Frenkel (Basic Books, 2013). I admire the way Frenkel's memoir braids mathematics together with the other threads of his life. Including poetry. Like me, he chooses E E Cummings as one of his favorite poets. And he used lines from Cummings' 1931 poem "the surely" as an epigram for a 2007 book that summarized his work.
Below I include the entire text of Cummings' poem, with Frenkel's epigraph highlighted in bold face.
the surely
Cued
motif smites truly to Beautifully
retire through its english
the Forwardflung backwardSpinning hoop returns fasterishly
Showing posts with label spiral. Show all posts
Showing posts with label spiral. Show all posts
Sunday, October 4, 2015
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Poets who Count
For some poets, counting is part of the language of the poem. For others, counting determines the structure. Here are two poems of the former sort -- "Counting" by British poet Philip Larkin (1922-1985) and "Adding It Up" by New England poet Philip Booth (1925-2007) -- followed by opening stanzas of a poem for which counting is part of both content and structure: "Millennium" by mathematician Peter Cameron .
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