Poetic Knowing

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."

Barton R. Friedman is the author of Fabricating History, English Writers on the French Revolution and Adventures in the Deeps of the Mind, both from Princeton University Press, and the poetry collection You Can't Tell the Players, published by Cleveland State University Press. Friedman was a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Cleveland State University.