POETICKS

Today I have another new word: “davinciation.”  I came up with it after reading an essay about mathematicians before around 1900 who were also poets.  Only two seemed to me major poets: Omar Khayam and Lewis Carroll, but a few in other languages than English that I’d never heard of may have been, too.  As for Omar Khayam and Lewis Carroll, Khayam was definitely both a major poet and major mathematician: the poems of his Rubaiyat are still widely read, and his Demonstration of Problems of Algebra presents the first definition of algebra in the history of mathematics.  I believe he was the first to find a method for solving third-degree equations, a geometric method that anticipated Descartes’s analytical geometry.  I consider Carroll a major poet although he wrote only “light” verse because I see no reason to consider light verse inferior to “serious” verse, although only at its rare very best.  But Carroll was merely a highly talented mathematician so far as I can tell.

Thinking about major poets who were also major mathematicians like Khayam, I wondered how many major poets were geniuses in some other significantly different field (unlike T. S. Eliot, for instance, who was a genius in both poetry and literary criticism).  Leonardo immediately jumped to mind.  But I had problems with him that I doubt many others, if any, have.  I tend toward denying visimagists preceding  the advent of non-representational painting genius.  To me they seem just skilled craftsmen, basically repeating reality rather than significantly adding to it.  I suppose some of them have to be consider geniuses as a sort of engineer: the first to use perspective (Brunelleschi, the architect), and Leonardo’s invention of sfumato (or is it only something he used very well?)

While thinking about Leonardo, I wondered what his second field of genius might be.  It didn’t seem to me quite science, and not too close to philosophy.  That’s when “davinciation” occurred to me: a field of versosophy that covers a great deal of varied subjects without unifying around any central organizing principal for any of its major subjects—as the pre-occupations of da Vinci seem to me to have been—and to have included his sculpture and painting.  Francis Galton seems a similar sort of genius although possibly not at da Vinci’s level.  Another might be Charles Sanders Pierce, but I haven’t been able to connect to his work well enough to know.  Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson are best thought of, it seems to me, a lesser geniuses in the field of davinciation.  Goethe, too—but he differed from Franklin and Jefferson in being a definitely major genius in literature.  Liebniz?  Possibly.  Descartes?  Anyone care to add a name or two?

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