Poetry and Mathematics
While lecturing at the People’s Institute, Scott M. Buchanan explored the elements of poetry and mathematics and determined that relationships among the words of poetry and the ratios of mathematics deserved further inquiry. That inquiry became Poetry and Mathematics, first published in 1929 and reprinted in 1962. In this volume, Buchanan concludes that “Mathematics and poetry move together between two extremes of mysticism, the mysticism of the commonplace where ideas illuminate and create facts, and the mysticism of the extraordinary where God, the Infinite, the Real, poses the riddles of desire and disappointment, sin and salvation, effort and failure, question and paradoxical answer.” This book is recognized by Buchanan’s contemporaries as a rediscovery of the medieval trivium and quadrivium. It is this discovery that led Buchanan to lead a “radical reform of teaching and learning in a small province of the modern academy.”
