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  1. Culture
10 June 2016

The love affair between science and poetry

Why these two subjects are not as different as we might think and the science of what happens in the brain when we read poetry

By Zayani Bhatt

Poetry and science seem like opposites – but the two have long been intertwined. At the Roundhouse in June, performance poet Robin Lamboll’s take was wonderfully dramatic. It featured a shouting, angry and judging voice – performance on “science being fun facts of the natural world and religion being Nietzsche’s the Antichrist.”

Watching it made me think about the flirtation of poetry and science and how deep a romance it is. In the late 1700s scientific treatises were written in poetic form because poetry was considered the language of intellect and the future. In the 1800s Lewis Carroll experimented with mathematical logic to create The Square Stanza.

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