The purpose of this article is to demonstrate that the experience of a poem qua poem is an experience of poetic thickness , i.e. an experience in which poetic form and poetic content are inseparable. I present a critical analysis of A. C. Bradley’s ‘Poetry for Poetry’s Sake’ lecture in Section 1, indicating both the strengths and weaknesses of his conception of resonant meaning. Section 2 draws on subsequent work by I. A. Richards and Peter Lamarque to advance my account (...) of the relationship in question, poetic thickness, understood as a demand made of a poem rather than a property discovered therein. In Sections 3–6 I discuss four objections to form-content unity from Peter Kivy: perfect circularity, ubiquitous unity, the sugar-coated pill tradition, and the defence from tradition. I show that all these objections fail against poetic thickness. I conclude that the experience of a poem qua poem is indeed an experience of thickness, and that poetic thickness is therefore a necessary condition of poetry. (shrink)

Do poems provide “scripts” for reader’s thoughts? Kendall Walton’s account of poets as thoughtwriters, in which poems can serve to express readers’ thoughts without positing an expressive thinker in the poem, is considered from various angles. While it seems a minimal expressive thinker needs to be posited, this leaves open other questions about poems as the stuff of thought. Can poems be fully thought, and do readers take ownership of the thinking that poetry prompts? Elizabeth Bishop’s “At the Fishhouses” is (...) discussed as a poem that allows the reader a chance to separate aspects of content and control of thought. (shrink)

This essay considers some problems in philosophical approaches to poetry. Philosophers’ accounts of what poetry is are often ill informed. They tend to select, as essential, features that can also characterize prose works: conspicuous metaphoricity, imagination, fictionality, and so on. This essay considers instead a humbler term: verse. It argues that the constraints on language implied by composing in verse are not only a handicap but can also be an engine for thinking. Even philosophy has sometimes been thought in verse, (...) rather than thought first in prose and versified later. This argument is explored through a brief consideration of Alexander Pope's Essay on Man. The essay concludes by questioning a further way of distinguishing between poetry and philosophy, Peter Lamarque's claim that paraphrasability is essential to philosophy but fatal to poetry. (shrink)

Various aspects of poetic meaning are discussed, centred on the relation of form and content. A C Bradley's thesis of form-content identity, suitably reformulated, is defended against criticisms by Peter Kivy. It is argued that the unity of form-content is not discovered in poetry so much as demanded of it when poetry is read 'as poetry'. A shift of emphasis from talking about 'meaning' in poetry to talking about 'content' is promoted, as is a more prominent role for 'experience' in (...) characterising responses to poetry and its value. It is argued that the key to poetic meaning lies less in a theory of meaning, more in a theory of poetry, where what matters are modes of reading poetry. Content-identity in poetry is said to be 'interest-relative' such that no absolute answer, independent of the interests of the questioner, can determine when a poem and a paraphrase have the same content. Interpretation of poetry need not focus exclusively on meaning, but on ways in which the experience of a poem can be heightened. (shrink)

Several years ago, the poet & critic Joan Houlihan offered a scathing and hilarious indictment of a lot of postmodern poetry for using words in a way that treats them as meaningless (or, perhaps, renders them meaningless). She suggested that word choice in such poems doesn’t really matter, and that the poet could just as well have substituted in other words without any change in meaning or aesthetic qualities. I argue that she’s wrong about this. I offer an account of (...) how interpretation and meaning function in poems that use words in highly non-standard ways. In such poems, there are associations and implicatures that one can reasonably expect a suitably backgrounded reader to grasp, rescuing interpretation from being a purely subjective and arbitrary activity. (shrink)

Lyric poetry is often associated with expression of the personal. For instance, the work of the so-called “confessional” poets, such as Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, is often thought to reveal inmost thoughts and feelings of the poetic voice through first personal expression. The lyric poem, with its use of personal pronouns and singularity of voice, appears to invite the reader to experience the unfolding of the words as the intimate expression of another.Intimacy itself is associated with attention to another (...) and is thought to play a role in feeling sympathy and empathy. As John Gibson comments, “Empathy makes possible an especially intimate and powerful form of identification. It underwrites our capacity...... (shrink)

Poetry holds an important place as part of our cultural heritage.1 However, despite poetry’s apparent cultural value, there have been surprisingly few attempts to articulate clearly how this should be reflected in the teaching curriculum in our schools and universities. As a consequence of this lack of clarity, the cultural value of poetry gives way to the increasing emphasis on providing instrumental justification for the teaching curriculum; including poetry in the curriculum is often justified in terms of promoting transferable skills (...) and knowledge such as problem solving, understanding and interpreting language, general creativity, widening vocabulary, identifying or “spotting” techniques, and learning... (shrink)

Recently, philosophers have discovered that they have a lot to learn from, or at least to ponder about, fiction. Many metaphysicians are attracted to fiction as a model for our talk about purported objects and properties, such as numbers, morality, and possible worlds, without embracing a robust Platonist ontology. In addition, a growing group of philosophers of mind are interested in the implications of our engagement with fiction for our understanding of the mind and emotions: If I don’t believe that (...) Anna Karenina exists, can I really pity her, or hope or desire that she extricate herself from her tragic situation? And why is there no “morality fiction,” analogous to science fiction? I suspect that philosophers have been especially comfortable thinking about fiction because it seems, at least prima facie, to employ the imagination in a way that conforms to a standard model of the mind. Specifically, contemporary philosophers tend to think of imagination as a form of mental pretense. Mental pretense can take two main forms: a cognitive attitude of supposing a set of propositions to be true (make-believe) or else an experiential state of imaging a scenario as if it were before one (imaging). Much of our pretense intertwines the cognitive and experiential modalities, of course. But both share a crucial common feature: all of one’s imaginative effort is invested in pretending that certain contents obtain. In this sense, we can understand imagination as the “offline” simulation of actual beliefs and perceptions (and perhaps other attitudes as well), where we analyze these in the normal way, as states individuated by their attitude and representational content. While I share the burgeoning interest in fiction, I want to suggest that we also have a lot to learn from poetry, and in particular from poetic metaphor. I will argue.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 27.1 (2003) 151-163 [Access article in PDF] Defining "Poetry" Robert B. Pierce SINCE TERMS ARE THE TOOLS of literary study, it is important to keep these tools in good condition, above all by having clear and functional meanings for them. Notoriously, many critical arguments about texts are in fact differences about terminology, and many confused arguments are built on vague or arbitrarily used terms. Few have (...) been the subject of more critical worrying and infighting than "poetry," 1 and few are more disparately defined. Definitions that are fuzzy or tendentious confuse many a discussion of poetry, and in particular they often narrow our response to the rich variety of the texts in front of us by silently imposing a view of what poetry ought to be. I would like to suggest that a Wittgensteinian approach to meaning can cut through a lot of the difficulty that surrounds the term. The refined understanding of the term "poetry" will result in a certain demystification, but it will dissipate only a false mystery based on confusion, not the real mystery of depth and richness that poetry can offer.What does it mean to approach this issue as a Wittgensteinian? The main principle is that the meaning of a term is its use, the way people deploy it in their speaking and writing, the work that it does. 2 A word does not have an essential core of meaning of which the various social uses are approximations; rather those social uses are the meaning. Thus meaning is a social phenomenon, and the way to determine it is to [End Page 151] look outward at how people use a term, not inward for some presumed mental essence that the term designates. Meaning is conventionally divided into reference and sense. What the term "poetry" refers to is a group of publicly visible things in the social world that we call poems, but there is no distillation in the mind that is the essence of poetry, the sense of the term. Of course we have a sense of the term that controls its range of reference. That sense is made up of our bases for calling one thing poetry and not another: the qualities that incline us to see a text as a poem. Wittgenstein would call these defining qualities criteria. The crucial fact is that they are determined by social processes and so are available to public inspection, not hidden away to be discovered only by introspection.Another observation about what it is to assign meaning to a term is important here. If someone asserts that "poetry" means X, he or she can appropriately be asserting that in fact the offered definition describes how people use the term, or else he or she can be suggesting how the term should or will be used in a specific discourse, that is, offering a definition proposal or stipulative definition. In the latter case the proposer needs to show the utility of the change from ordinary speech for his or her purposes. That is of course what literary critics do when they specify meanings for a term like "tragedy" or "irony" that are different from common usage. It is not that Wayne Booth's way of talking about irony uses the real meaning (both his and the ordinary senses are perfectly real since both are socially used), but that his is more useful for literary criticism than the general usage because it is more precise and nuanced. 3Thus it would make sense to begin defining "poetry" by looking at how people use the term and in particular how it is used in literary discourse. However, though I will pay some attention to what critics actually say and write, I would like primarily to offer certain proposals for refining our use of the term so as to avoid confusion and vagueness. It is not that this investigation will be approaching the real meaning of "poetry," which I have suggested is an imaginary goal, but that it will propose a use of the term constituting a vehicle for talking and writing about poetry that... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 27.1 (2003) 151-163 [Access article in PDF] Defining "Poetry" Robert B. Pierce SINCE TERMS ARE THE TOOLS of literary study, it is important to keep these tools in good condition, above all by having clear and functional meanings for them. Notoriously, many critical arguments about texts are in fact differences about terminology, and many confused arguments are built on vague or arbitrarily used terms. Few have (...) been the subject of more critical worrying and infighting than "poetry," 1 and few are more disparately defined. Definitions that are fuzzy or tendentious confuse many a discussion of poetry, and in particular they often narrow our response to the rich variety of the texts in front of us by silently imposing a view of what poetry ought to be. I would like to suggest that a Wittgensteinian approach to meaning can cut through a lot of the difficulty that surrounds the term. The refined understanding of the term "poetry" will result in a certain demystification, but it will dissipate only a false mystery based on confusion, not the real mystery of depth and richness that poetry can offer.What does it mean to approach this issue as a Wittgensteinian? The main principle is that the meaning of a term is its use, the way people deploy it in their speaking and writing, the work that it does. 2 A word does not have an essential core of meaning of which the various social uses are approximations; rather those social uses are the meaning. Thus meaning is a social phenomenon, and the way to determine it is to [End Page 151] look outward at how people use a term, not inward for some presumed mental essence that the term designates. Meaning is conventionally divided into reference and sense. What the term "poetry" refers to is a group of publicly visible things in the social world that we call poems, but there is no distillation in the mind that is the essence of poetry, the sense of the term. Of course we have a sense of the term that controls its range of reference. That sense is made up of our bases for calling one thing poetry and not another: the qualities that incline us to see a text as a poem. Wittgenstein would call these defining qualities criteria. The crucial fact is that they are determined by social processes and so are available to public inspection, not hidden away to be discovered only by introspection.Another observation about what it is to assign meaning to a term is important here. If someone asserts that "poetry" means X, he or she can appropriately be asserting that in fact the offered definition describes how people use the term, or else he or she can be suggesting how the term should or will be used in a specific discourse, that is, offering a definition proposal or stipulative definition. In the latter case the proposer needs to show the utility of the change from ordinary speech for his or her purposes. That is of course what literary critics do when they specify meanings for a term like "tragedy" or "irony" that are different from common usage. It is not that Wayne Booth's way of talking about irony uses the real meaning (both his and the ordinary senses are perfectly real since both are socially used), but that his is more useful for literary criticism than the general usage because it is more precise and nuanced. 3Thus it would make sense to begin defining "poetry" by looking at how people use the term and in particular how it is used in literary discourse. However, though I will pay some attention to what critics actually say and write, I would like primarily to offer certain proposals for refining our use of the term so as to avoid confusion and vagueness. It is not that this investigation will be approaching the real meaning of "poetry," which I have suggested is an imaginary goal, but that it will propose a use of the term constituting a vehicle for talking and writing about poetry that... (shrink)

Poetry is a literary art, and is often examined alongside the novel, stories, and theater. But poetry, much of it, has more in common with music, in important respects, than with other forms of literature. The emphasis on sound and rhythm in both poetry and music is obvious, but I will explore a very different similarity between them. All or almost all works of literary fiction have narrators—so it is said anyway—characters who, in the world of the fiction, utter or (...) write the words of the text thereby reporting the events of the story. But there is a very different way of understanding literary works, one applicable especially to poetry. Much music can be understood in a similar manner, and doing so nicely explains several important characteristics of listen-ers’ experiences. (shrink)

If philosophy and poetry are to illuminate each other, we should first understand their tendencies to mutual antipathy. Examining mutual misapprehension is part of this task. J. L. Austin's remarks on poetry offer one such point of entry: they are often cited by poets and critics as an example of philosophy's blindness to poetry. These remarks are complex and their purpose obscure—more so than those who take exception to them usually allow or admit. But it is reasonable to think that, (...) for all his levity at their expense, what Austin offers poets is exemption from forms of commitment. Since such exemption is precisely what poets and critics have sought, this diagnosis is eirenic. This exemption has a price, but it may be affordable. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 27.1 (2003) 151-163 [Access article in PDF] Defining "Poetry" Robert B. Pierce SINCE TERMS ARE THE TOOLS of literary study, it is important to keep these tools in good condition, above all by having clear and functional meanings for them. Notoriously, many critical arguments about texts are in fact differences about terminology, and many confused arguments are built on vague or arbitrarily used terms. Few have (...) been the subject of more critical worrying and infighting than "poetry," 1 and few are more disparately defined. Definitions that are fuzzy or tendentious confuse many a discussion of poetry, and in particular they often narrow our response to the rich variety of the texts in front of us by silently imposing a view of what poetry ought to be. I would like to suggest that a Wittgensteinian approach to meaning can cut through a lot of the difficulty that surrounds the term. The refined understanding of the term "poetry" will result in a certain demystification, but it will dissipate only a false mystery based on confusion, not the real mystery of depth and richness that poetry can offer.What does it mean to approach this issue as a Wittgensteinian? The main principle is that the meaning of a term is its use, the way people deploy it in their speaking and writing, the work that it does. 2 A word does not have an essential core of meaning of which the various social uses are approximations; rather those social uses are the meaning. Thus meaning is a social phenomenon, and the way to determine it is to [End Page 151] look outward at how people use a term, not inward for some presumed mental essence that the term designates. Meaning is conventionally divided into reference and sense. What the term "poetry" refers to is a group of publicly visible things in the social world that we call poems, but there is no distillation in the mind that is the essence of poetry, the sense of the term. Of course we have a sense of the term that controls its range of reference. That sense is made up of our bases for calling one thing poetry and not another: the qualities that incline us to see a text as a poem. Wittgenstein would call these defining qualities criteria. The crucial fact is that they are determined by social processes and so are available to public inspection, not hidden away to be discovered only by introspection.Another observation about what it is to assign meaning to a term is important here. If someone asserts that "poetry" means X, he or she can appropriately be asserting that in fact the offered definition describes how people use the term, or else he or she can be suggesting how the term should or will be used in a specific discourse, that is, offering a definition proposal or stipulative definition. In the latter case the proposer needs to show the utility of the change from ordinary speech for his or her purposes. That is of course what literary critics do when they specify meanings for a term like "tragedy" or "irony" that are different from common usage. It is not that Wayne Booth's way of talking about irony uses the real meaning (both his and the ordinary senses are perfectly real since both are socially used), but that his is more useful for literary criticism than the general usage because it is more precise and nuanced. 3Thus it would make sense to begin defining "poetry" by looking at how people use the term and in particular how it is used in literary discourse. However, though I will pay some attention to what critics actually say and write, I would like primarily to offer certain proposals for refining our use of the term so as to avoid confusion and vagueness. It is not that this investigation will be approaching the real meaning of "poetry," which I have suggested is an imaginary goal, but that it will propose a use of the term constituting a vehicle for talking and writing about poetry that... (shrink)

If philosophy and poetry are to illuminate each other, we should first understand their tendencies to mutual antipathy. Examining mutual misapprehension is part of this task. J. L. Austin's remarks on poetry offer one such point of entry: they are often cited by poets and critics as an example of philosophy's blindness to poetry. These remarks are complex and their purpose obscure—more so than those who take exception to them usually allow or admit. But it is reasonable to think that, (...) for all his levity at their expense, what Austin offers poets is exemption from forms of commitment. Since such exemption is precisely what poets and critics have sought, this diagnosis is eirenic. This exemption has a price, but it may be affordable. (shrink)