Agon: Poetry's Challenge to the Mathematization of Reality (1920s-1960s) (Oxford English Monographs)

Agon: Poetry's Challenge to the Mathematization of Reality narrates the battle for truth-telling authority between poetry and mathematics in the 1920s-1960s. Analysing subversive uses of mathematical metaphors in British and American poetry, it argues that modernism posed the last serious challenge to mathematics, whose authority to determine for all the true nature of reality had grown steadily from Newton to Einstein. The book paints William Blake's defiance of the Enlightenment as the background or emblem to the modernist resistance, whose main protagonists were William Empson, Laura Riding, Charles Olson, W.B. Yeats, and Michael Roberts, among others. Introducing a novel paradigm of criticism -- the agon -- to interdisciplinary study in the humanities, Anirudh Sridhar traces the rise of mathematics from the seventeenth century onwards, and shows how it supplanted philosophy, poetry, and the other arts as the language in which reality would be described and comprehended.