Thought and Poetry by Koethe, John;

Long description:

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 Ashbery 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:

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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