Poets Thinking

[Glendora Starr]

Poetryis often regarded as the product of inspiration rather than intellect. Vendler seeks to emphasize the importance of thought in poetry...She shows poetic thought as reflected in poetic voice, structure, and prosody in four poets: Alexander Pope, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and W. B. Yeats...Vendler's convincing and illuminating arguments make this book highly recommended.

[Vendler's] thoughtful and insightful readings of poems by Alexander Pope, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and William Butler Yeats demonstrate the central and indeed essential role of sophisticated thinking in the poetic enterprise...To navigate the intricacies of thought that a poem contains, it is hard to imagine a better guide than Vendler herself. Her most admirable achievement is perhaps her ability to illuminate the connection between what a poem says and the formally oriented issue of how it says it. One might have expected a book explicitly on poetic thinking to neglect form, and focus only on content. But Vendler considers this approach a serious mistake, and her insights regarding form constitute the strongest argument for this position.

Some people seem surprised by the idea that poets do any thinking at all. There is a popular image of the poet as a wild, inspired, untutored and half-mad figure striding across the heath. Helen Vendler's new book, Poet's Thinking, if it is read as widely as it ought to be, will help considerably to correct this misperception.

In her challenging and entertaining new book, Poets Thinking, Helen Vendler argues that poetry in all its manifestations, however ostensibly irrational, is a mode of thinking that commands not just our aesthetic appreciation but also our intellectual respect...Vendler is a wonderful elucidator of individual poems. Nobody writes more insightfully about a poem's stylistic armature, and the emotional and intellectual purposes that armature serves. And by examining the distinctive strategies of thinking in the work of such radically different poets as Pope, Whitman, Dickinson, and Yeats, Vendler makes visible aspects of style and language that other critics simply haven't seen.

One of the most distinguished critics of poetry in the English-speaking world...Vendler engages in close reading to find a poem's distinctiveness of language and literary form...Vendler is really trying to enlarge our idea of what poetry can be...In reminding us to look at and listen to the actual words on the page, and not to leap too soon to some hackneyed idea that they recall, Vendler invites us to expand our own response to experience.

Vendler's close readings lay bare the process of poetic reflection: Poets Thinking is about how rather than what poets think, about the act of the mind rather than any 'embalmed thought' that readers might want to extract from verse...Vendler is exceptionally skilled at demonstrating that poetry offers us pictures of the mind at work rather than settled axioms to take away...[Poets Thinking] has a good deal to offer in the way of thought-provoking and sometimes dazzling readings of British and American poetry.

Helen Vendler's Poets Thinking is lucid, accessible, and inspired...Vendler's own voice is that rare academic combination of expertise and accommodation...Her arguments provide ample explanation and exempla for the lay reader while provoking the academic to revisit old assumptions. She is at ease with the broad sweep of American and English poetry and with the critical methods of the last half-century. Her conclusions seem remarkably self-evident, a voice of trustworthiness and reason that encourages us to lean closer, to listen carefully.

I bumped upon a book on metametaphysics and I feel likereading about consciousness and philosophy of the mindfrom a contemporary perspective, but right from the start,in the face of an alarming net of thinkers and tendencies,this is the impression and the question that stikes me:

This is a basic, but good, philosophy question. Philosophers take things that start out as poetry and try to make them rigorous. Eventually if it's made so rigorous as to be fully analytic, or testable, it becomes mathematics or science respectively. It may also make it into law or policy making, as lawyers and policy makers also need rigorous ways to think about general subjects. It also makes it into psychotherapy, since patients tend to use words and logic to work through their problems, and philosophy has helped them, or at least help the educators of their psychotherapists, do it better.

A typical philosophy problem is to take a common concept like "knowledge" or "freedom", try to define it rigorously in relation to other concepts we know about, and see how well all of those definitions capture our experience of what those concepts are. It might work like this:

Does a theory of knowledge matter? It does in a court of law when you ask a question like, "did you know the victim have a weapon or did you merely think that?" It does in science research. And people seem to distinguish "improbable" and "impossible" and make decisions accordingly.

Wittgenstein suggested philosophy is more like therapy, that helps us dispense with confusion & contradictions that arise due to language (mis)use. He saw it as identifying 'whereof we must remain silent', in which he included pretty much all of metaphysics.

Few philosophers have done poetry. TS Eliot gets close to a kind of philosophy in Burnt Norton. Rumi is certainly an extremely deep thinker - Subtle Degrees & This Being Human and many other of his poems have very deep insights.

I would say poetry is about generating an experience, a feeling, in response to it. Whereas philosophy aims to examine the frames from which we decide what to do. That could for some thinkers be considered essentially an aesthetic choice, I'd say Nietzsche gets close to saying that, "the abyss also gazes into you" is about evoking an experience rather than asserting a truth, as we discussed here. But it's not the only approach. If some philosophers

I think you will like this article, about the use of 'strange loops' in philosophy, which I feel kind of unites philosophy pictured as therapy, and a kind of aesthetic instinct to find a place beyond previous systems where there is a spaciousness of thought, from putting down old questions that are no longer being useful.

Aristotle believed that poetry and philosophy were more alike than they were to history, law, and factual accounts, since both seek truths or descriptions that are timeless--or, as Ezra Pound put it, "news that stays news."

Many early philosophers, such as Parmenides, wrote in verse, and this tradition continued up until Lucretius, at least. Nietzsche and Sartre wrote dramatic-poetic works, and poets like Dante, Donne, Blake, and Goethe wrote philosophical verse.

Though Plato's works can be quite poetic, he famously descried the philosophical poverty of the poets. His main target was Homer, whose heroes and gods portrayed impassioned, amoral actions, the very opposite of deliberation. And this shift away from verse and orality to the written word and dialectic was a crucial turn in philosophy.

Despite all this, I would say the two cannot really substitute for one another, unless we stretch definitions. It would be hard, perhaps impossible, to do good, innovative philosophy in poetic style and vice versa. Poetry may be good at synthesis, analysis not so much. While philosophy may use evocations and metaphors, it must strive for defined and explicit discourse.

Poetry, on the other hand, enriches itself according to how much can be left unsaid, elusive connections that we are forced to provide out of our own mental freedom without necessity or lawlike determinations. Poetry, as Dr. Johnson said of Milton, "delights to tread on the brink of meaning."

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