Mathematics and . . . POETRY?!

Here is a list of 17 quotes from historical figures.  In each, the key word (some variation of math/poetry or mathematician/poet) has been left out.  Can you guess which art form is being described in each case?

Answers & Authors Below:   (M = Math-related, P = Poetry-related)

1.  ___P___ is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.  Samuel Johnson
2.  To think the thinkable – that is the  ___M___’s aim.   Cassius J. Keyser
3.  All  ___P___ [is] putting the infinite within the finite. Robert Browning
4.  The moving power of __M____ invention is not reasoning but imagination. A. DeMorgan
5.  When you read and understand  ___P___, comprehending its reach and formal meanings, then you master chaos a little.  Stephen Spender
6.   ___M___ practice absolute freedom.   Henry Adams
7.  I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine-tenths of our intellectuals can’t read any  ___P____. Randall Jarrell
8.  Do not imagine that  ___M___ is hard and crabbed, and repulsive to common sense.  It is merely the etherealization of common sense.  Lord Kelvin
9.  The merit of  __P___, in its wildest forms, still consists in its truth; truth conveyed to the understanding, not directly by words, but circuitously by means of imaginative associations , which serve as conductors. T.B. Macaulay
10. It is a safe rule to apply that, when a  ___M___ or philosophical author writes with a misty profundity, he is talking nonsense.   A. N. Whitehead
11.   __P____ is a habit.  C. Day-Lewis
12. . . . in  ___M___ you don’t understand things, you just get used to them.  John von Neumann
13.  __P____ are all who love – who feel great truths. P. J. Bailey
14. The  __M____ is perfect only in so far as he is a perfect being, in so far as he perceives the beauty of truth; only then will his work be thorough, transparent, comprehensive, pure, clear, attractive, and even elegant.  Goethe
15. . . . [In these days] the function of  ___P___ as a game . . . [looms] larger than its function as a search for truth. C. Day-Lewis
16. A thorough advocate in a just cause, a penetrating  __M____ facing the starry heavens, both alike bear the semblance of divinity. Goethe
17.   __P___ is getting something right in language. Howard Nemerov


 
Source:  The American Mathematical Monthly, Feb 1992, in turn taken from an article by Professor JoAnne Growney entitled “Mathematics and Poetry: Isolated or Integrated?” which appeared in the Humanistic Mathematics Network Newsletter #6 (May 1991), 60 – 69.

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