Abstract
This chapter characterises an aspect of the relationship between philosophy and lyric poetry by giving an account of poetic thought: a mode of thinking in which philosophical contributions are made poetically. When one encounters poetic thinking, it will be harder to detach what has been said from how it has been said; hence poetic thought is resistant to paraphrase in a way that traditional philosophy typically isn’t. Yet this raises problems that will remain intractable unless we reconsider what it can mean to think philosophically. Taking poetic thought as this chapter recommends means we can insist on its cognitive and rational dimensions, but without overlooking the crucial role in it of feeling and embodiment.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
See ‘The Elusiveness of Poetic Meaning,’ 408.
- 2.
As Lamarque indicates in ‘Semantic Finegrainedness and Poetic Value’ (2015, 28), this may mean that the best way to capture the relationship between content and form in poems is with the concept of supervenience. For the purposes of my argument in this chapter, it doesn’t matter whether we conceive of content and form as numerically identical yet analytically separable or of content as supervening on form.
- 3.
See ‘Semantic Finegrainedness and Poetic Value,’ 2015, 28.
- 4.
I am not denying that aspects of a poem’s form may seem to function in a kind of tension with its apparent content, as Christopher Ricks says takes place in A.E. Housman’s work (‘To me his poems are remarkable for the ways in which rhythm and style temper or mitigate or criticise what in bald paraphrase the poem would be saying’ (1964, 268)). Nor I am asserting that form necessarily does or should ‘echo’ content, as in the anapests of Byron’s ‘The Destruction of Sennacherib,’ which mimic the galloping of the horses they describe. In such contexts ‘form’ and ‘content’ are actually being used in a different way. On my account, the tension between the bleak attitudes some of Houseman’s poems may appear to express and their jaunty rhythmic structures is part of what they have to say, hence part of their genuine and not merely apparent content. In my sense of the terms, the form of a Housman (or any other) poem could never be in tension with its content, though it may well appear to be in tension with the prose paraphrasable ‘content’ of a poem understood in a crude (or in Ricks’s word ‘bald’) sense.
- 5.
In ‘The Heresy of Paraphrase,’ Lepore makes somewhat similar claims about poetry generally, arguing that part of what distinguishes a poem from other forms of expression is that a poem is ‘partly about its own articulation’ (2009, 196). It is part of his attempt at solving the problems he claims are raised by the notion that poems cannot be paraphrased. Lepore thinks he has to provide his solution because he supports a number of claims about language that my account challenges, however, such as the Fregean principle that ‘[t]one makes no difference to the truth of the thought expressed by a given sentence’ (185).
- 6.
This can be contrasted usefully with a point Lamarque and Kivy both make (see Lamarque, ‘The Elusiveness of Poetic Meaning,’ 2009, 400 and Kivy 1997, 88–89) about Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura, when they acknowledge that the philosopher-poet stated that he expressed his philosophical system in verse only because it would make his ideas more palatable to his audience (as he put it, he wanted to ‘touch it with the Muses’ delicious honey’ (quoted Kivy 89)). When philosophers read De Rerum Natura, it is usually in this spirit (which is to say, in the spirit in which it was intended): as a text that propounds a philosophical system that happens to have been placed in the form of verse. That the philosophy is presented in verse, in other words, is a contingent fact about it, as its form is not crucial to what it has to say; thus Lucretius’s text is not an example of poetic thinking of the sort I am tracking. When philosophers read Lucretius’s work, they do not treat it as a poem in Lamarque’s sense, because they do it without assuming form-content unity (which is not to say it would be impossible to go against its spirit and read it as a poem rather than a philosophical treatise).
- 7.
Nothing in the above commits me to endorsing affect theory, privileging the role in cognition of ‘nonsignifying, autonomic processes that take place below the threshold of conscious awareness and meaning’ (Leys 2011, 437). Indeed I support Ruth Leys’s critique of affect theory as well as Linda Zerilli’s extension of her critique (see 2015, 269). However my account also supports Zerilli’s critique of the intellectualist brand of cognitivism on which Leys may be relying (see 2011, 270), rejecting an idea shared by both affect theorists and traditional cognitivists who insist on the propositionality of intentional and conceptual experience: that ‘what is conceptualist is by definition strictly intellectualist, i.e., fully detached from embodied affective propensities’ (272). Along with Zerilli, in other words, I am arguing that ‘[a]ffect and cognition are not two different systems but [are] radically entangled’ (282). Jarvis makes a similar point when he writes of the need for ‘a revised phenomenology of the body, one which could understand the body not as an originally insignificant and qualityless data set… but rather as always already cognitive’ (2006, 81).
- 8.
In From Modernism to Postmodernism, Jennifer Ashton (2005) develops a fascinating and provocative account of the vicissitudes of ideas of textual autonomy, authorial intention, and meaning in twentieth-century poetics. She also develops a theoretical argument that is relevant to my concerns in this chapter. She distinguishes modernist ideas of textual autonomy from postmodernist ideas of readerly participation in the construction of their meanings:
Where the ‘closed text’ is imagined to have a meaning that exists independent of the interpretations of its readers and therefore remains unaffected by them, the open text is reconstituted every time it is read. And because it is reconstituted every time it is read, there is no prior meaning to be discovered through interpretation. (4)
As Ashton demonstrates, postmodern ideas about textual indeterminacy have often been grounded in claims about the importance of the ‘physical features’ and ‘material constituents’ (5) of poems in the affective experiences of readers, which on many accounts effectively undermines the idea that poems could have inherent meanings at all. If my account in this paper is right, however, it may challenge the validity of precisely this inference from the material and affective aspects of our engagements with poems to the claim that meaning is always (and perhaps only) constructed by readers. Though my account stresses the role of embodied affect in reading, this should not trouble the notion that poems have meanings, nor that those meanings are their authors’; nor should it trouble the idea that a good interpretation is by definition an objectively accurate one.
In other words, I am rejecting the idea that any aspect of the world which relies for its salience on a subjective affective propensity (for example, one’s sense of irony) can never count as an objective feature of it. In John McDowell’s (1998) terms, this means rejecting ‘the doctrine that the world is fully describable in terms of properties that can be understood without essential reference to their effects on sentient beings’ (114). Alice Crary (2012) develops a similar idea in relation to W.G. Sebald’s fine novel Austerlitz, giving a powerful account of how literary works can ‘contribute internally to genuine or rational understanding specifically as works of literature (i.e., specifically as works that tend to engage readers emotionally in various ways)’ (494).
- 9.
I am of course not using ‘poetic’ in the sense of ‘graceful,’ ‘elegant,’ ‘aesthetically pleasing,’ and so on.
- 10.
Difficulty of paraphrase might be necessary for poetic thinking but obviously it is not sufficient: after all, I can’t paraphrase what I simply can’t understand, and that does not imply it must be poetic.
- 11.
See Diamond (1982).
- 12.
Hence Heidegger remark on ‘the danger of understanding melody and rhythm… from the perspective of physiology and physics, that is, technologically, calculatingly…’ (1971, 98).
Bibliography
Ashton, Jennifer. 2005. From Modernism to Postmodernism: American Poetry and Theory in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cerbone, David. 2012. Lost Belongings: Heidegger, Naturalism, and Natural Science. In Heidegger on Science, ed. Trish Glazebrook, 131–155. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Crary, Alice. 2012. W. G. Sebald and the Ethics of Narrative. Constellations 19 (3): 494–508.
Diamond, Cora. 1982. Anything but Argument? Philosophical Investigations 5 (1): 23–41.
Heidegger, Martin. 1971. On the Way to Language. Translated by Peter Hertz. New York, NY: Harper & Row.
———. 1975. Language. In Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter, 185–208. New York, NY: HarperCollins.
———. 2000. Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry. Translated by Keith Hoeller. New York, NY: Humanity Books.
———. 2002. The Age of the World Picture. In Off the Beaten Track, ed. and trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes, 57–85. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hulatt, Owen. 2016. The Problem of Modernism and Critical Refusal. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 74 (1): 47–59.
Jarvis, Simon. 2006. Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kant, Immanuel. 1998. The Critique of Pure Reason. Edited and translated by Paul Guyer and Allen Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kivy, Peter. 1997. Philosophies of Arts: An Essay in Differences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lamarque, Peter. 2009. The Elusiveness of Poetic Meaning. Ratio 22: 398–420.
———. 2015. Semantic Finegrainedness and Poetic Value. In The Philosophy of Poetry, ed. John Gibson, 18–36. Oxford and New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Lepore, Ernie. 2009. The Heresy of Paraphrase: When the Medium Really Is the Message. Midwest Studies in Philosophy 33: 177–197.
Leys, Ruth. 2011. The Turn to Affect: A Critique. Critical Inquiry 37: 434–472.
McDowell, John. 1998. Aesthetic Value, Objectivity, and the Fabric of the World. In Mind, Value, and Reality, 112–130. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Quine, Willard Van Orman. 1961. On What There Is. In From a Logical Point of View: 9 Logico-Philosophical Essays, 1–19. New York, NY: Harper & Row.
Richards, I.A. 1970. Poetries and Sciences: A Reissue of Science and Poetry (1926, 1935) with Commentary. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company.
Ricks, Christopher. 1964. The Nature of Housman’s Poetry. Essays in Criticism XIV (3): 268–284.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1978. Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics. Edited by Rhees Wright and G.E.M. Anscombe and translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Zerilli, Linda. 2015. The Turn to Affect and the Problem of Judgment. New Literary History 46: 261–286.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Abbott, M. (2018). Lyric Poetry. In: Stocker, B., Mack, M. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54794-1_11
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-54793-4
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-54794-1
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)