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

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Anirudh Sridhar (Dean of Thought Leadership, Dean of Thought Leadership, Alliance University)

Agon

Poetry's Challenge to the Mathematization of Reality (1920s-1960s)

Anirudh Sridhar (Dean of Thought Leadership, Dean of Thought Leadership, Alliance University)

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English

Oxford University Press
19 November 2025

Literary studies: poetry & poets; Philosophy of mathematics; Mathematical physics

Series: 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. He explores (from the agonistic paradigm) the role of calculus, quaternions, Riemannian manifolds, non-Euclidean geometry, analysis, mathematical logic, and more. Extensive close readings of mathematical poems show how they critique the ways in which mathematical tools reduce phenomena and abstract the world of experience. These readings bring out the formal, performative, and reflexive ways in which such poems act as defences of poetry's ability to achieve fidelity to experience and a richer picture of reality. Rather than posing poetry as a passive receptacle of mathematical ideas, 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.

By: Anirudh Sridhar (Dean of Thought Leadership Dean of Thought Leadership Alliance University)
Imprint: Oxford University Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 242mm, Width: 165mm, Spine: 23mm
Weight: 596g
ISBN: 9780198985457
ISBN 10: 0198985452
Series: Oxford English Monographs
Pages: 304
Publication Date: 19 November 2025
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Anirudh Sridhar is Dean of Thought Leadership at Alliance University, where he set up the School of Liberal Arts. He also pursues his interests in climate law as Senior Visiting Fellow, GRICCE at the London School of Economics.

Reviews for Agon: Poetry's Challenge to the Mathematization of Reality (1920s-1960s)

""It is written in a refreshingly clear style""; ... not at all in the constipated manner of some literary critics, and I think it should interest not only people in the field of the modernisms of mathematics and poetry, but people with a liking for the work of the people he discusses (Yeats, Empson, Roberts, Riding, and Olson). * Jeremy Gray, The Open University * This is a thorough and well-informed book, especially notable for its treatment of mathematics and science, superior to that of most scholarly work in literary studies. * Arkady Plotnitsky, Purdue University *