“OUT OF FIXED PROPORTION, BEAUTY RISES”: A REVIEW OF MATHEMATICS IN FORMAL POETIC CONSTRAINT

As Bertrand Russel once said, “The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry” (Russel 60). Poetry and mathematics are recognizably linked through aesthetics and counting at the most fundamental level, but these basic connections can be further extended to formal constraints in poetry. The link between mathematics and poetry, as well as formal poetic constraint based on mathematical structures and principles is inherently organic. The sestina and the sonnet are traditional poetic forms that contain intrinsic mathematical structures. The Fib, the S+7 algorithm, and computer-generated poetry are modern forms which have been explicitly based on mathematical structures.