Kelly is an adjunct professor of creative writing and literature at Oakton Community College and an associate professor of literature and creative writing at College of Lake County and has written extensively for academic publishers. In this essay, Kelly examines reasons why it would be a mistake to include Dove's poem in the tradition of anti-scientific poetry.

It would be very easy for readers to oversimplify the message that can be found in Rita Dove's poem "Geometry," taking the poem to be nothing more than yet another burlesque of humanity's endless fascination with intellectual order. Read lightly, the poem does in fact seem to suggest that the drive to make order out of chaos is a vain and hopeless one that is doomed to failure. It begins with a blunt, triumphant declaration of success, as the speaker announces proof of a theorem. After that, the poem does...