Agon: Poetry’S Challenge To The Mathematization of Reality (1920S-1960S)

Agon narrates the battle for truth-telling authority between poetry and mathematics in the modernist period (between the 1920s and 1960s). Analysing its subversive uses of mathematical metaphors, this book argues that modernism posed the last serious challenge to the Empire of Mathematics, whose authority to determine for all the nature of reality had steadily grown from Newton to Einstein. The book’s protagonists are William Empson, Laura Riding, Charles Olson, W.B. Yeats, and Michael Roberts, though many others will play smaller roles in the contest. Agon introduces a new paradigm of criticism to interdisciplinary studies in the humanities. It casts the different faculties as not co-existing peacefully but rather as engaged in a perpetual struggle for supremacy. The book traces the rise of mathematics, supplanting philosophy, poetry, and the other arts, as the language in which reality would be described from the seventeenth century onwards, looking at the role of calculus, quaternions, Riemannian manifolds, non-Euclidean geometry, analysis, mathematical logic, and more. The book performs close readings of mathematical poems that bring to the fore a lack in the mathematical picture of reality. The poems will in turn prosecute a reflexive argument about poetry’s role in filling those gaps and presenting a richer version of reality. Rather than posing poetry as passive receptacle of mathematical ideas, as the influence-tracing method in literary criticism demands, the agon allows for an intense contestation of poetic and mathematical modes and their claims to truth through careful attention to the playfulness and subversiveness animating cross-disciplinary interaction. © Anirudh Sridhar 2025.