Poetry, we might think, is about capturing impressions and and not what philosophers call propositional knowledge (knowing-that), which is.
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German thinkers from Hegel to Heidegger and Adorno have interrogated poetry for what nuggets of philosophical truth it contains, but the poor poet is rarely left to speak for himself. In French thought, from Sartre to Badiou, it has become almost as de rigueur for the philosopher to offer meditations on poetry, with whatever degree of cogency, as it is to philosophize on love. Love and poetry may also be central to the life of analytical philosophers in the Anglo-Saxon tradition, but they have rarely been central to his or her writings.
With respect to the latter at least, things may be changing, as the philosophy of art is undergoing something of a revival. In his introduction to this collection of essays, its editor John Gibson tells us that the emphasis here is on modern poetry. In modern poetry, meaning is latent rather than overt, or is put into question, and any sense of narrative or anecdote is fractured or subverted.
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For Gibson, any theory based on the concept of narrative would be inapplicable to poetry in the modernist paradigm. We are led inexorably from the generalities of the philosopher theorizing about a particular artform, to the specifics of the literary critic giving an account of a particular poem.
Not all of these generalizations are exactly ground-breaking. Certainly we might savour the sound of the words of a poem or admire the brush-strokes of a painting, but we do not go to the poem solely to find an arrangement of words any more than we go into an art-gallery to look at patches of paint.
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What is important is what the words and the paint convey. This is surely why we have language in the first place.
Nor is it the case, as de Sousa suggests, that surrealist poetry is especially marked by a density of language. Rather, surrealist poetry is marked by its frequency of improbable juxtapositions, which is another thing entirely.
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A Shakespeare sonnet is likely to be more linguistically dense than any surrealist poem by virtue of the concentration demanded by its form. Its words can often be construed in different, even incompatible, ways. So whereas instrumental prose, such as that of philosophy, aims at a single unambiguous meaning, poetry may allow multiple meanings, and demand various interpretations.
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This richness of utterance is one of the reasons we value poetry; but again it is not the only reason, nor is it the case that all poetic utterances are hard to fathom. Indeed, it is remarkable how many of the most often-quoted lines of poetry are not only not in the least obscure but also free of metaphor. One thinks of Thomas Gray observing Eton schoolboys at play: Jesse Prinz and Eric Mandelbaum remind us rightly in this volume that, unlike instrumental prose, the smallest alteration in a poem may impact its value. They then unintentionally go on to illustrate that very point by misquoting a famous couplet from T.
Much of the muddle one finds oneself in when theorizing about poetry results from the fact that we look at a poem from two not easily reconcilable perspectives: A poem is incompetent if its form is flawed; trivial if it fails to make us feel or think more deeply. Considerations such as these give rise to notions such as the heresy of paraphrase and the indissociability of form and content.
Both notions insofar as they are not two ways of implying the same thing present problems of their own.
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In many cases this is surely the case. But not in all. However, it would still fail to capture the means by which that meaning is made memorable, that is, by the rhyme and rhythm. Interpretations of the poem abound, and no single paraphrase would be admissible.
What is a definition of the philosophy of poetry?
But this is far from saying that form and content are somehow one. Similarly, with contemporary poet John Ashbery, we find meanings hinted at that are never quite decipherable. In their absence we can only guess as what the words refer to. The effect is that of overhearing snippets of conversation in an imperfectly-understood foreign language. According to Eliot, modern poetry has to be difficult. Some of it though by no means all does place severe obstacles to understanding. There is a tendency among the contributors to this volume to fetishize opacity. Yet poetic form may do exactly the opposite: Yet his abstruse syntax and long, bewildering sentences, are equally a feature of his prose, whose political effects would have been negligible had his contemporaries found it as baffling as Zamir appears to find his poetry.
The implied contrast between philosophical clarity and poetic opacity can be belied by comparing a page of Milton with a page of Kant. We may struggle to understand either, but there is little doubt as to who offers the greatest impediments to understanding. The book concludes with an invigorating suspension of intellectual borders as Rorty focuses on the romantic tradition and relates it to philosophic thought. In these lectures Rorty is singing the same old and good song about what we must give up. The lesson is so bracing and so difficult because it is delivered in the context of a tradition--philosophy since Plato--that had been dedicated to the doing of these impossible things for centuries.
Richard Rorty, in these wonderfully clear and compact lectures, gave the best summary of his views of the meaning of truth and the philosophy of language and mind. The vigor with which Rorty presents his account of philosophy, and the questions raised by how he connects it to topics like poetry and romanticism, are stimulating and fascinating. Rorty is one of the most eloquent, provoking and original mid to late-century American writers with an interest in philosophy.
Richard Rorty was affiliated over the course of his long teaching career with Princeton University, the University of Virginia, and Stanford University. Recognized as one of the most important voices in American philosophy of the late twentieth century, he was the author of numerous landmark works, including Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. University of Virginia Press P.
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