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> Poe also provoked his readers with disquisitions on the technological basis for his literary work, laying out how he would take a poem “step by step, to its c
by hirundo 5y ago
> Poe also provoked his readers with disquisitions on the technological basis for his literary work, laying out how he would take a poem “step by step, to its completion, with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem.”
So he composed poetry like many of us write code. I wonder if poetry in general shares a form of mental athletics with programming. I'd expect a compiler for poetry to be close to impossible. Though maybe a poetry linter could be useful.
In the end code is strictly constrained by reality and poetry only by imagination, making them fundamentally different. Except maybe for oddities like Poe.
- throwanem 5y agoImagine what you may, in earth and under heaven - there's nothing in the way of being really *that* unreal, /* poetlint-ignore-next-line no-inflected-rhyme */ but only what we do and say, imagination-leaven'd. /* poetlint-ignore-next-line no-rain-pain-style-rhyme */ The world constrains us all no less, for all we so reveal. // TODO "but are we so constrained", et cetera, et ceter // TODO "when worlds we make at will," and so on in same meter
- bombcar 5y agoThere are many ways to do “art” and two I know of are the “spontaneous” method that makes it look easy - but there’s also the methodical method. The end results can be very similar even though the paths diverge.
- leephillips 5y agoNabokov spoke of the precision of poetry and the passion of science. Both a poet and a scientist (and a chess problem composer), he had experience. When David Hilbert heard that a young mathematician had left mathematics for literature, he remarked that it was a good choice, as the man had not sufficient imagination for mathematics.