But I did email you, John. Truly I did.

Because of this... http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Whock

Columbo.

I'm sure you did, Ann. I remember that entry. Dearie me!

What John said is very true. Pope was a very philosophically inclined poet, and he supplied poetry with his Essay on Man, however in point of philosophy itself he fell short (that was his chief philosophical effort). I say this as a consummate Pope fan. For all its flours and embellishments of poetry, a Swiss philosopher Crousaz effectively criticized the Essay on the grounds of its philosophy.
For my part, I think matters that appertain to the art of living, ethics, and issues relating to the human heart are more amenable to treatment in poetry than epistemology, or metaphysics for example; yet even those I believe are not amenable to a systematic treatment in the way that philosophy proposes to do. What Pope did in the Essay on Man was supply poetry of philosophical concepts that were not at all revolutionary but already commonplace, yet in such a way that reading them they impressed the mind as though they were new. So I second what John said. Johnson criticized Pope for the philosophy in the Essay yet also allowed it showed:
"... his observations on the operations of the mind and the modes of life, shew an intelligence perpetually on the wing, excursive, vigorous, and diligent, eager to pursue knowledge, and attentive to retain it." Still if philosophy is what one craves, for merely the ideas themselves alone, one might find better nourishment in Immanuel Kant, or Heidegger, Hume or Isaiah Berlin.

Ann,

http://33.media.tumblr.com/7309f9b30...dc3bo1_500.gif

Of course, Mrs Feeny could be white trash ... :)

-Matt

Big topic, and we did have a thread once about Philosophy and Poetry, but I disagree with this, Eric. Didactic verse is not the only way to convey philosophy, nor the way I personally prefer. Poetry can embody philosophy in symbols and images. The profundity in King Lear or Song of Myself is philosophy in act. I like my philosophy with hair on it.

Try reading George Santayana's Three Philosophical Poets, on Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe. They were philosophical poets in a way Pope (who I like a lot) was not.

Ann, I wouldn't regard the Urban Dictionary as authoritative. Many of its entries seem to have been written by kids who have just read the novel Frindle (about a fifth-grader who invents a new word and tries to get others to use it). And the definitions for words that actually exist often seem like a deliberately offensive version of Fictionary.

Example: Check out the winning definition for trigger warning, and scroll down to the competing definitions. Compare upvotes and downvotes.


BTW, people who are distracted by the highlighted search terms in Erato threads can trim the highlighting instructions off the end of the URL. E.g., Andrew's link above, with highlighting, is:

http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/showth...losophy+poetry

Trim the "&highlight=philosophy+poetry" bit from that URL, and you're left with

http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/showthread.php?t=3747

Andrew, sorry I didn't mean that philosophy can't be effectively found in poetry, it can indeed. It's just that I think if you merely want to gather ideas in and of themselves, prose writing is a more suitable medium in general for philosophical systems. I agree with you though that good philosophy can indeed be found in poetry, in a variety of ways and is.

I think it is a mistake to consider poetry as a vehicle to deliver or convey something other than itself, be that comedy or philosophy. Poetry is its own thing, sui generis, and can be found even in places where there are no words. Poetry that purports to be merely the carrier of something distinct from it is a mechanical construct, a verse-mobile.

"When I speak of poetry I am not thinking of it as a genre. Poetry is an awareness of the world, a particular way of relating to reality." (Andrey Tarkovsky)

Nemo

John,

You're poisoning the well before anyone even tries to draw water...

Best,

Bill

If you consider Jesus of Nazareth a philosopher, note that he famously taught via parables...which are a very open-ended mode of communication, asking each reader to engage with the imagery in his or her own way. That strikes me as a poetic approach.

Given the number of his self-identified followers who seem to have missed the point of many of his teachings, I do sometimes wish he had spelled things out a little more clearly for them.

Then again, many of his self-identified followers tend to have difficulties with his clear-cut commandments, too. So it's debatable which mode of communication is more effective for conveying philosophical principles.

I suppose this is more or less my take: Poetry written for the sake of philosophy, as for the sake of anything else, affords not poetry. Poetry written for the sake of poetry itself, however, has been observed to sometimes afford or touch upon philosophy.*

*This statement exaggerates and amplifies; I think this may be true in the more extreme cases of writing poetry for philosophy, but perhaps there is a more subtle or less recognizable interrelation as well, between one's desire to articulate ideas about beauty, truth, etc, on the one hand and the need for poetry to be its own end on the other.

Erik,

Are we reading too literally here? Now, I admit, I have an aversion to Pope, so I'm going to recoil from any example citing him. But even his "What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed" contains an aesthetic, and is the basis for an aesthetic judgement.

I don't think anyone would suggest every poem should contain a brand new answer to the questions of "what do we know, what should we do, what can we hope for?" But surely every poet has thoughts about beauty and goodness and truth that go beyond saying one equals the other, and that's the extent of all possible knowledge? Surely everyone who puts pen to paper has a transformative and constantly transforming aesthetic, even if most don't care to articulate it.

Those are the two questions that most interest me: what can we say about beauty, and why are we so reluctant to say anything about it? Are there those who say we shouldn't talk about it? Yes, but we have to respect them enough to realize that underneath their objections there are defensible, intelligible judgments about the nature of beauty and the nature of poetry.

Of course, I blame Archibald MacLeish for this reluctance, but he passed on three decades ago, and that poem is from 1926. And he didn't mean it, even then.

Best,

Bill

Ann, your lunge to save us all from possible morpheme thought crime brought out the best or worst in me -- maybe they're identical. Great fun, anyway. I am going down to the corner to watch the illuminated pedestrian signs alternately flash red and green at right angles, instructing people to "Don't Hwock!" and "Hwock!". I will be thinking that a problem with big ideas about life (philosophy) in poetry lies in the readership, which is polarized and often dismissive of uncomfortable views, whether "progressive", firmly conservative (in the best sense), or just unusual. It wasn't always like that : Lucretius, Horace, Alexander Pope (yes, John W.), even LHU Tennyson, Dickinson, etc etc. Now we must fit into some asinine political cubbyhole or other, and promptly be dismissed.

I think we are perhaps, being too literal actually. I think as when you read a poem the matter at hand is rather complex, so it often happens the first approaches to it starts on the most literal level and then, reduces complex intersections with simplified reductions, only as an preliminary posture to then move outward and refine one's apprehensions. The truth is I think there's a gray area, a hazy intersection that may exist between the impulse to articulate ideas one holds about beauty and truth, etc, on the one hand; and the need for poetry to be an end in itself on the other. Clearly, ideas one holds and wants to express can come out in poetry, yet I think the danger is also still there that if poetry is only used to convey some doctrine or other, it may become versified philosophy rather than poetry. Or so I suppose.

Best,
Erik

But here, you're setting up a binary opposition, which looks an awful lot like a straw man. Surely we can say something meaningful?

Best,

Bill

From R. Nemo Hill:
But this in itself doesn't preclude poetry from touching on anything or everything. This reminds me of a call for submissions to Rattle for Feminist Poets (initial caps important), for those who identify as Feminist Poets, and "often use poetry to advocate for women’s rights." I wanted to submit to this issue, but balked when I read the word "use...to advocate"... I can never write poetry "to advocate for" something, to set out with a purpose, a sole purpose, and "use the muse." Poetry encompasses all levels and should not be deliberately, consciously confined to a purpose. Or so I believe. Which, again, means that it can touch on philosophy, feminism, ethics, etc. but cannot defined and confined by them. Poets who write about philosophy, such as Dante (and I defer to Andrew on this), it seems to me have incorporated philosophy (and ideas generally) into their overarching worldview which in turn drives their creative response, so that the subject is not imposed or artificially sought as a "subject." Indeed any subject, if not integrated into the poet's "heart," can inspire a certain artificiality. If that makes sense.

"But here, you're setting up a binary opposition, which looks an awful lot like a straw man. Surely we can say something meaningful?"

Of course we can, Bill, but not because we set out to. Setting out to convey one meaning/doctrine is where the binary opposition is set up—not in the recognition of that fatal split in work that is crippled by it from the outset.

Tarkovsky again:

"In a word, the image is not a certain meaning, expressed by the director, but an entire world reflected as in a drop of water."

"The function of image, as Gogol said, is to express life itself, not ideas or arguments about life. It does not signify life or symbolize it, but embodies it, expressing its uniqueness."

"The lines are beautiful, because the moment, plucked out and fixed, is one, and falls into infinity."

Nemo

I think Nemo's got it right. Poetry's an inside-out emanation that acquires worldly features and ego-makers along the journey.

"for those who identify as Feminist Poets, and "often use poetry to advocate for women’s rights."

Of course my identity damns me at the start, but this sounds to me Siham like identity politics gone in search of advocacy papers, surreptitiously of course.

All overt tracts will be rejected. Rather, disguise your grinding axes (Frost's forbidden grievances) in stanza form please.

"We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us--and if we do not agree, seems to put its hand in its breeches pocket." --Keats, letter to Reynolds, 2/3/18 [or 3 Feb 1818].

Andrew, I remember a review in which the male reviewer (whose name I have forgotten) criticized Alicia Stallings' poems for having no philosophy. I was shocked that he could not see that there is a humane, thoughtful, consistent world-view underpinning her work and that that is a philosophy, too, one that fits well with what poetry is trying to do. Too often the writers, usually male, who complain that there is no philosophy in a particular poet's work are looking for some kind of treatise on "the big issues" and not a poem at all. The great poems are a coming to terms with life in all of its complexity. Sometimes that coming to terms is expressed in ideas; sometimes the ideas are embodied in an experience or the poet's complicated response to it.

Susan

Susan, I'm thinking of a male reviewer who criticized Rhina P. Espaillat's poems for their "modernist smallness," rather than going on to tackle "greater things." The reviewer listed her poems' domestic subjects and sighed, as if it was self-explanatory that poems "about" such mundane things couldn't possibly be wrestling with Big Philosophical Questions.

What a dork.

"Beauty is truth; truth beauty," -- that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

- John Keats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn"

OF Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit
Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tast
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat,
Sing Heav'nly Muse, that on the secret top
Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire
That Shepherd, who first taught the chosen Seed,
In the Beginning how the Heav'ns and Earth
Rose out of Chaos: Or if Sion Hill
Delight thee more, and Siloa's Brook that flow'd
Fast by the Oracle of God; I thence
Invoke thy aid to my adventrous Song,
That with no middle flight intends to soar
Above th' Aonian Mount, while it pursues
Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhime.
And chiefly Thou O Spirit, that dost prefer
Before all Temples th' upright heart and pure,
Instruct me, for Thou know'st; Thou from the first
Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread
Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss
And mad'st it pregnant: What in me is dark
Illumin, what is low raise and support;
That to the highth of this great Argument
I may assert Eternal Providence,
And justifie the wayes of God to men.

- John Milton, Paradise Lost

The aim of the poet is to inform or delight, or to combine together, in what he says, both pleasure and applicability to life. In instructing, be brief in what you say in order that your readers may grasp it quickly and retain it faithfully.

- Horace, Ars Poetica

Just saying.

The way I see it (one of the two or three conversations going on here--I don't mean to exclude others) is that Nemo (correct me if I’m wrong, Nemo) is recognizing the irreducibleness of the poetic image. A poem or an image cannot really be “translated” into rational concepts, not fully anyway. It’s an experience of the whole person—or “soul,” as I prefer to call it. Philosophical poetry or poetic philosophy doesn’t “mean” in the way conceptual philosophy does; it conveys a sense of meaningfulness, the way a Bach cello suite does, as whole as life.

At the same time, the Bach cello piece or even the Tarkovsky image contains an immemorial storehouse of symbolic knowledge and culture—the spiritual and mental DNA of generations of life, art, philosophy-theology, and more. Not “doctrine” in a direct way, but culture that comes out of a unity of being--of shared knowledge.

About “symbolic knowledge”: The Neoplatonist Proclus said that there are two ways to apprehend transcendent or vertical realities. The first is wordless and imageless contemplation of metaphysical realities, in prayer and meditation. This is the way of some saints, monks, mystics. The second is through the symbolic imagination, since the imagination and symbols share in something of the world of the senses and also of the intelligible, the world of meanings. It’s what Henry Corbin called the mundus imaginalis, the imaginal world. This is the way of the philosophical or mystical artist. Dante put it this way: angels do not need language, since as pure celestial intelligence they apprehend the real directly; human beings do need language, because our apprehension of the non-literal real mostly happens in that middle realm, between the senses and the intellect.

And it can’t be accurate that “it is a mistake to consider poetry as a vehicle to deliver or convey something other than itself,” as Nemo said, since that would mean that King David, Rumi, Dante, and the author of the Bhagavad Gita made a mistake. But I don’t believe this necessarily contradicts what Tarkovsky and the other people that Nemo quotes said: The poem is the thing itself, that’s what makes it poetry, and that’s what makes it (I am painfully aware) untranslatable. Poetry or painting or architecture or any art communicates philosophically by transporting the listener or viewer to an experience of the idea when it is still in its matrix.

Yes, Andrew, my comment, “it is a mistake to consider poetry as a vehicle to deliver or convey something other than itself,” suffered from a certain amount of rhetorical over-zealousness and as a result skirted dangerously close to a sterile aestheticism. I didn't mean that poetry is only self-referential, but rather, as you have clarified, that the poetic image is first and foremost irreducible. Meaningfulness here means meaning's fullness, full of meanings, and in fact many of those meanings can contradict one another—which is why a single-minded rational approach strangles an image from the beginning. The image is not the servant of the idea, but rather the ground/matrix of all ideation.

Nemo

"The basis of all excellence is truth: he that professes love ought to feel its power." (Johnson)
An effective poem is such that it brings truth to bear of some kind or other and makes it accessible to the reader. The truth need not be what you would get from a philosophy book necessarily, though it sometimes is; it is very often some truth, even indefinable as it may be, that is gathered or felt of the human experience. The ultimate function to result from effective poetry and indeed literature is to preserve and celebrate as well as to help realize truths about our human experience we might not otherwise have realized or apprehended so potently. This does not mean one need sit down and think from the outset I will convey this and that truth by means of poetry (there can be hazards in that, when taken to its extreme); but in writing effective poetry, truth may come to bear and be made accessible to an audience.

Poetry helps us come into a fuller awareness of our being and also to preserve our awareness and wisdom. Sometimes the motives of poetry as a primary end can include teaching this or that, rather as a secondary and subordinate component under the main. But I think in all cases truth can be gleamed from effective poetry whatever the kind, as poetry in its essence helps us face and sense some truth about our being. As Heidegger put it Poetry and language helps us dwell:

"What then does ich bin mean? The old word bauen, to which the bin belongs, answers: ich bin, du bist mean: I dwell, you dwell. The way in which you are and I am, the manner in which we humans are on the earth, is Buan, dwelling. To be a human being means to be on the earth as a mortal. it means to dwell. The old word bauen, which says that man is insofar as he dwells, this word barren however also means at the same time to cherish and protect, to preserve and care for, specifically to till the soil, to cultivate the vine."

All I can say is, I'd bet a sawbuck you guys don't think like this when you're writing. As the great comedian put it, "Enough with the small talk -- off with the clothes!"

Best,

Ed

But Ed, I was sawbuck naked when I wrote that. :eek:

Heidegger, someone said a while back. Do you mean to say there is someone here who understands Heidegger? Share your knowledge wih us do. And you can chuck in Husserl while yo'ure about it.

I like a lot of kinds of poetry, Susan. Variety is the spice, etc., and this isn’t about rules or restrictions. But I find there is very little current poetry that creates the sort of “entire world” of altered consciousness that Nemo mentions in an earlier post on this thread. In my own writing, I myself rarely pull off a shred of it. It can’t be forced or contrived, so I slog along and look for it where I can get it.

You bring up the poetry of Alicia Stallings, and Julie brings up Rhina Espaillat, and I admit (bring on the fire and brimstone!) that I don’t find that quality in their work. Brilliant writing and striking insight, yes, but not that. I like it but it is not what I most want in poetry. If we are naming names, I will say that among the best-known “formalist” and anthologized poets who do it for me, David Mason in his lyrics probably comes closest. There are others too who are less well known.

You can turn it into a women’s issue, but here’s my five-word response to that: Hildegaard of Bingen. Emily Dickinson.

The neo-formalist aesthetic in general tends to downplay the visionary and hermetic for the practical and skeptical; it favors Larkin over Yeats. For me the priorities or criteria are reversed. Larkin was a good poet, but I’m not sure he knew the difference between Plato and Playdough, or metaphysics and Marmite.

Ok, I guess I’ve just committed Spheresy. Bring on the Inquisitors!


Meanwhile, I’m hoping that Bill Lantry has more to say on this: “Those are the two questions that most interest me: what can we say about beauty, and why are we so reluctant to say anything about it?” So far I draw a blank. But the questions are evocative.

John, I suspect you take so much delight in claiming not to understand Heidegger, that the gauntlet you've thrown down seems mostly a rhetorical flourish. But to my mind, no philosopher has rationally tackled the ineffabilities of poetry better than he. Read poetically, I think he is clear as a bell.


".....the exciting question: how can that which by its very nature remains hidden ever become a measure? For something that man measures himself by must after all impart itself, must appear. But if it appears, it is known. The god, however, is unknown, and he is the measure nonetheless. Not only this, but the god who remains unknown, must by showing himself as the one he is, appear as the one who remains unknown. God's manifestness—not only he himself—is mysterious.

A strange measure for ordinary and in particular for all merely scientific ideas, certainly not a palpable stick or rod but in truth simpler to handle than they, provided our hands do not abruptly grasp but are guided by gestures befitting the measure here to be taken. This is done by a taking which at no time clutches at the standard but rather takes it in a concentrated perception, a gathered taking-in, that remains a listening.

Martin Heidegger (trans, Albert Hofstadter)
Poetry, Language, Thought: "...Poetically Man Dwells


That which shows itself and at the same time withdraws is the essential trait of what we call the mystery.

Martin Heidegger (trans, John M. Anderson / E. Hans Freund)
Discourse On Thinking: Memorial Address


To write about something you must write with it, you must write/be in it: within it. Hence the poetic thinking of Heidegger. Oh, he had other political problems as well, but his writings on poetry (on Holderlin in particular) are exquisite and invaluable to me. He walks the rational as far as it can go, and if he needs to re-invent the lexical wheel near the far edge of thought where cerebration falters, then he merely proves himself as much poet as philosopher.

What Andrew says about variety and spice holds true for me as well. In fact, despite all my comments here, I adore Alexander Pope. But I also do not lose sight of my poetic ideals; and these ideals would not be ideals if they were easily made manifest. One of the reasons I may seem to rail against light verse on these boards is because I think it is true that the so-called new formalism tends to elevate it at the expense of "the visionary and hermetic" and thus gives the impression that formal poetry lends itself better to the one that the other. I disagree with that, and feel it vital to take a stand now and again for the contemporary marriage of the formal and the visionary.

Nemo

neverminded

Poems which explicitly address Big Philosophical Questions or weighty abstract nouns almost always strike me as pompous and dull. One of my favourite poems on poetry is Making a Meal of It, by Dick Davis, which contains the wonderful line:
“No point in calling up
vast, empty words like Fate –
the table’s set, sit down
and eat what’s on your plate.”

One of my favorite "philosophical" poems is by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman. He wrote it as a grad student at Princeton, as I recall, and mentioned it in his memoirs:

I wonder why, I wonder why,
I wonder why I wonder;
I wonder why I wonder why
I wonder why I wonder.

Succinct and memorable.

I do understand what you mean, Andrew F.--truly I do--but the fact remains that a poem with a male narrator doing things in a stereotypically male sphere is often automatically deemed to be about Man, capital M, and addressing Big Questions of Relevance to All Humanity; sometimes this is phrased as The Voice of the Tribe, deemed of relevance to everyone. But change to an obviously feminine viewpoint (which, BTW, Emily Dickinson hardly ever has), and many male readers seem unwilling or unable to identify with the protagonist or situation. It's just a chick writing a chick poem for chicks, and therefore couldn't possibly be about anything important.

Even in this discussion, men are tossing around the term Man when they mean "all humanity." Women are automatically expected to assume that they are included in that term...but when women talk about their own experience, male readers tend to stand outside of it and refuse to see themselves as included.

It drives me nuts when I write about rape and some male readers say I'm attacking them. No I'm not, I'm attacking the rapist. What is WRONG with some guys, that in such a scenario they can more easily identify with an antisocial person who happens to be male, rather than with a decent human being who happens to be female? But I digress.

So, yeah. Gender issues. They're a thing sometimes.

Julie, I have a very heavy work load at present, so will have to bow out of this thread after this post, but I feel I owe you a response.

I want to point out, first, that I never said the works I mentioned have no importance. I don’t know where you got that idea. And that the writers were women has nothing to do with it, since I meant male neo-formalists as well.

As for women’s issue aspect, in addition to Hildegaard and Emily, mentioned earlier, I can name Kathleen Raine, Mirabai, Catherine of Siena, the Sybil of Cumae, my wife Daphne. And many more. The point is that there is hermetic profundity and intuition that is not by Man, as you call it. Whoever does it, that is what I most want. To identify it as only male is to negate the women saints, mystics, seers, sybils, prophets. I know you don’t want to do that, Julie, but that’s the binary you’re setting up, or seem to be.

And with that, I have to get some rest. I realize we are not going to see eye to eye on this, and that is ok. I didn’t expect nearly anyone would agree with me here. And that is ok too.

Andrew, I think we differ mainly in taste, and slightly in our definitions. The type of philosophy that I am interested in is a practical philosophy, a way of living one's life with grace and meaning, and I do find useful insights for that in the works of Stallings, Espaillat, Dickinson, and many other poets, male and female. I have little interest in philosophies that take me out of this life and into another plane entirely. Hermetic poetry is not at all to my taste, and visionary poetry may be lovely, but is not closest to my heart.

Susan

Nemo, I think I fell out of love with philosophy after David Hume.

“If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion."

Sorry, Andrew, I expressed myself very poorly if you got the impression that I thought you and I were not basically on the same side of the gender question.

We agree that the mystical, altered-consciousness tradition of poetic expression includes both men and women. We also agree that Alicia Stallings and Rhina P. Espaillat--and many formalists of both sexes--tend not to write in that particular tradition (although Rhina has done many lovely translations of St. John of the Cross, who certainly did).

I do, however, also share Susan's view that the types of subtle philosophical explorations that Stallings and Espaillat engage in through their poetry tend to be missed by more male readers than female readers.

The reason for that may be as simple as what Nemo keeps emphasizing--that poetry allows readers to experience the presented images and scenarios firsthand. Those things have very different emotional resonance depending on the reader's personal history with them; and that emotional resonance, or lack thereof, sometimes affects the reader's willingness to look past a metaphorical vehicle's outer surface for deeper layers of meaning.

You were talking about something else, though--"the visionary and hermetic" approach vs. "the practical and skeptical"--and I went off on a tangent, so I'm sorry for the confusion. My bad. Readers' unwillingness or inability to empathize with certain kinds of narrators and protagonists is one of my hobbyhorses, so I never miss an opportunity to hop aboard.

"It's just a chick writing a chick poem for chicks, and therefore couldn't possibly be about anything important."

Thanks for saying this, Julie.

I understand the attitude you are describing, but that sort of dismissiveness doesn't seem to me to be as pervasive as you suggest. Alicia and Rhina are not lacking for enthusiastic male fans at the Sphere, myself among them, and my favorite American poet is Emily Dickinson, whom I don't look at as anything even vaguely resembling a chick writing chick poems for chicks. Catherine Tufariello has written some of my favorite poems ever, and I'm reasonably confident that my short-list of favorite poets currently posting at the Sphere would be heavily skewed to female poets, Mary and Julie among them. (I just won two free Ablemuse books in the translation contest, and the two I requested were by female poets). While I don't doubt that we all bring to our reading of poems a personal outlook that includes our gender, I think it's somewhat unfair therefore to accuse male readers of somehow not getting or appreciating women's work. And I don't read poetry for philosophy, but I see as much philosophy in women's work as men's.