Poetry

In spite of being one of the oldest literary forms, and arguably the most universal, poetry has not attracted much direct attention from philosophers, in particular not from those working in analytical aesthetics in the past sixty or so years. It is not that contemporary philosophical aestheticians have neglected literature at large but their attention in that regard has mostly been to prose fiction and the problems it gives rise to concerning reference, truth and meaning. There are notable exceptions, of course, both ancient and modern. Aristotle’s treatise on Poetics is a systematic philosophical exploration of poetry, so important in fact that it has yet to be superseded as such, while in modern times one of the founders of analytical aesthetics, Monroe C. Beardsley, devoted a sizeable proportion of his 1958 magnum opus Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism to poetry. But, aside from these striking exceptions, the relative neglect cannot be disguised. Why have philosophers neglected poetry? One clue is in terminology. The

term “literature,” designed to accommodate all the literary arts or “letters,” including poetry, drama and the novel, is a post-eighteenth-century usage; prior to that, the generic term “poetry” had been used to cover most acknowledged literary forms. However, under this new labeling, poetry as such seemed to drop from view. So when contemporary philosophers have addressed “literature” – offering to define “literature” and to explore its distinctive values, moral, cognitive or aesthetic – they have tacitly taken poetry for granted under that heading and perhaps have assumed that poetry more narrowly conceived does not generate specific philosophical problems of its own. Indeed one of the key philosophical debates concerning (imaginative) literature, namely, its relation to philosophy with regard to knowledge and truth, a problem first raised by Plato, has been applied indifferently to poetry (in the classical debate) and to the novel (more recently). The first important question, then, is whether poetry, comprising a subclass of

literature, does pose significant philosophical problems in its own right. At first glance it might seem as if it does not. If we lump literary works, in the relevant sense, together as “works of the imagination” then it might seem that the actual form these works take, prose or verse, narrative or drama, even long or short, will not make a crucial difference to the issues that interest philosophers: for example, what kinds of values they exhibit and what “status” they hold among other modes of discourse. Furthermore, where poetry is thought to be distinct from other kinds of

literary productions, this is commonly attributed either to its formal devices like rhyme, meter, rhythm and alliteration, or to its unusually extensive uses of tropes such as metaphor, metonymy, irony or synecdoche. But, so the argument might run, the former do not raise particular issues for philosophy (they fall within their own field of study, prosody), and the latter are well treated by the philosophy of language or linguistics, so do not need specific philosophical attention aimed at their use in poetry. It is arguable, though, that this dismissive approach is a mistake and that when given

proper attention poetry in fact raises intriguing and important questions for philosophy, which are not merely applications of questions raised elsewhere. Significant issues, for example, might arise from such themes as paraphrasability, form-content unity, the primacy of experience in poetry, “semantic density” and questions about “poetic truth.” To see whether such topics really do engage philosophical interest it might be best to introduce and give focus to them through two general questions of a kind familiar to aestheticians: What is distinctive about poetry among other art forms? and What are the specific values that poetry affords?