Poetic Knowing: From Mind’s Eye To Poetic Knowing in Discourses of Poetry and Science

Barton R. Friedman argues that the languages of literature and science empty many of the same conceits. Poetic Knowing focuses on the rhetorical strategies by which scientists and poets create knowledge, and includes close readings of Yeats, Blake, Tennyson, Williams, and Olson. Scientists are rhetorically engaged in transactions comparable to poets; they fabricate metaphrs and analogies that concretize insights into nature. Friedman argues scientists and poets do not form two cultures but uneasily coupled, ultimately complementary, parts of one.