“[V]erses are no more no less than written language broken up into numerical segments” (203). It is “a fusion of speech with number by means of lineation” (204). “Poets write in verse because it excites not only the verbal imagination, but also the numerical imagination” (205). [David J. Rothman]
Collis: Sometimes human beings have been called the walking species, the tool-making species, or the symbolic species. But we are also the counting species, our enjoyment of pattern is inseparable from the counting and quantification that reveals pattern.
Perhaps poetry exists at the juncture between symbolizing and enumerating.