Thought and Poetry: Essays on Romanticism, Subjectivity, and Truth

✍ Scribed by John Koethe

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 211
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

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.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Half Title
Series
Title
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 The Metaphysical Subject of John Ashbery’s Poetry (1978)
2 Contrary Impulses: The Tension between Poetry and Theory (1990)
3 Poetry and the Experience of Experience (1993)
4 The Romance of Realism (1996)
5 Poetry at One Remove (1998)
6 Thought and Poetry (2000)
7 Styles of Temptation and Refusal in Wittgenstein and Stevens (2003)
8 On John Ashbery’s “Definition of Blue” (2007)
9 Wittgenstein and Lyric Subjectivity (2007)
10 Comments on Susan Wolf’s Meaning in Life and Why It Matters (2007)
11 Poetry and Truth (2009)
12 Poetry, Philosophy, and the Syntax of Reflection (2012)
13 On John Ashbery’s “Clepsydra” (2013)
14 Perplexity and Plausibility: On Philosophy, Lyrical and Discursive (2013)
15 On Helen Vendler’s Wallace Stevens (2014)
16 The Microcosm: Poetry and Humanism (2016)
17 On Wordsworth’s Fun (2021)
18 Philosophical Reflection on Poetry (2021)
Appendix: Metaphysics and the Mind–Body Problem (2019)
Notes
1 The Metaphysical Subject of John Ashbery’s Poetry (1978)
2 Contrary Impulses: The Tension between Poetry and Theory (1990)
3 Poetry and the Experience of Experience (1993)
4 The Romance of Realism (1996)
5 Poetry at One Remove (1998)
6 Thought and Poetry (2000)
7 Styles of Temptation and Refusal inWittgenste in and Stevens (2003)
8 On John Ashbery’s “Definition of Blue” (2007)
9 Wittgenstein and Lyric Subjectivity (2007)
10 Comments on Susan Wolf ’s Meaning in Life and Why It Matters (2007)
11 Poetry and Truth (2009)
12 Poetry, Philosophy, and the Syntax of Reflection
15 On Helen Vendler’s Wallace Stevens (2014)
18 Philosophical Reflection on Poetry (2021)
Appendix: Metaphysics and the Mind–Body Problem (2019)
Bibliography
Index