I have just finished writing a book on poetry and mathematics, entitled Great Circles: The Transits of Mathematics and Poetry. When it is published in early 2018, it will help launch a new series of books published by Springer, “Mathematics, Culture and the Arts,” edited by Marjorie Senechal (Editor of the Mathematical Intelligencer), Jed Buchwald at the California Institute of Technology, and Jeremy Gray at the Open University. The first part of the book is autobiographical, and this excerpt explains how the Great Books Program at the University of Chicago encouraged me to think and write about poetry and mathematics in tandem, over half a century.