Mathematics and Poetry in the Nineteenth Century

This chapter charts the progress of mathematics across the nineteenth century as it is registered in poetry by canonical writers and scientists. It begins with the uses that romantic poets made of classical mathematics, principally Euclid. As the century progressed the cultural centrality of Euclid was displaced by new forms of mathematics, the application of which to other disciplines came to determine their status as a science. Lewis Carroll and James Clerk Maxwell record and respond to these changes in verse, while the increasingly masculinist identity that comes with the mathematization of the sciences is considered in poems by William Whewell, W. J. M. Rankine, and Constance Naden. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the convergence of mathematics and poetry in prosody.