Thought and Poetry: Essays on Romanticism, Subjectivity, and Truth (Bloomsbury Studies in Philosophy and Poetry)

Bloomsbury Studies in Philosophy and Poetry explores ancient, modern, and contemporary texts in ways that are sensitive to philosophical themes and problems that can be fruitfully addressed through poetic modes of writing, and focused on questions of style, the relations between form and content, and the conduciveness of literary modes of expression to philosophical inquiry. With a keen interest in the intertwining of poetry and philosophy in all forms, the series will cover the philosophical register of poetry, the poetics of philosophical writing, and the literary strategies of philosophers. The series provides a home for work on figures across geographical landscapes, with contributions that employ a wide range of methods across academic disciplines, and without regard for divisions within philosophy, between analytic and continental, for example, that have outworn their usefulness. Featuring single-authored works and edited collections, curated by an international editorial board, the series aims to redefine how we read and discuss philosophy and poetry today. "Addressing objective and subjective views of the self and the world in philosophy and poetry, this collection brings together a chronology of John Koethe's thoughts on the connections between the two forms and makes a significant contribution to unsettling the oppositions that separate them. The essays traverse the philosophical conception of the self in modern poetry and locate connections between poets including William Wordsworth, Wallace Stevens, and John Ashberry alongside philosophers including Kant, Schopenhauer, and Wittgenstein. Koethe pays special attention to romantic poetry and notions of the sublime, which he maps onto subjective individual experience and the objective perspective on the natural world. Koethe further explores this theme in a new essay on romanticism and the sublime in relation to the mind-body problem. Using an associative and impressionistic style to write philosophically about poetry, Koethe defends his own approach that such writing cannot and should not aim for the rigor of philosophical argumentation."-- Provided by publisher Introduction 1. The Metaphysical Subject of John Ashbery's Poetry. 2. Contrary Impulses 3. Poetry and the Experience of Experience 4. The Romance of Realism 5. Poetry at One Remove 6. Thought and Poetry 7. Styles of Temptation and Refusal in Wittgenstein and Stevens 8. Wittgenstein and Lyric Subjectivity 9. Comments on Susan Wolf's Meaning in Life and Why It Matters 10. Poetry and Truth 11. Poetry, Philosophy and the Syntax of Reflection 12. On John Ashbery's “Clepsydra” 13. Perplexity and Plausibility: On Philosophy, Lyrical and Discursive 14. On Helen Veldler's Wallace Stevens 15. The Microcosm: Poetry and Humanism 16. On Wordsworth's Fun 17. Philosophical Reflection on Poetry Appendix A: Metaphysics and the Mind-Body Problem Notes Bibliography Index