[Andrew Frisardi]

Huge subject, obviously. But I've been thinking about it and wonder what others think.

I'll give you my take--as of today, at 10 a.m. Tomorrow, I'd no doubt choose something else to say about it.

Both philosophy and poetry aim for--or should aim for--obedience to truth. Only the terms they use are different: philosophy uses abstract language and reason, usually, whereas poetry for the most part uses imagination and figurative language. The philosopher aims to state truth apart from the stamp of his or her personality, the poet's truth has personality stamped into the language itself.

Real philosophy doesn't seek truth as theoretical and abstract--that's for professional academicians, not philosophers--but truth as direct and actual. "Truth as such," as they say.

Both poetry and philosophy aim at truth as a destination still unknown.

My own favorite poets, Dante and Yeats, are explicitly philosophical, but I doubt there is such a thing as a poem without some philosophy in it.

Here's something that Wallace Stevens says on the subject. I don't really agree with it completely but it might be food for thought:

The truth that we experience when we are in agreement with reality is the truth of fact. In consequence, when men, baffled by philosophic truth, turn to poetic truth, they return to their starting point, they return to fact, not, it ought to be clear, to bare fact (or call it absolute fact), but to fact possibly beyond their perception in the first instance and outside the range of their sensibility. What we have called elevation and elation on the part of the poet, which he communicates to the reader, may not be so much elevation as an incandescence of the intelligence and so more than ever a triumph over the incredible.--from "The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet," in The Necessary Angel

The part I don't agree with is that this has to do with poetry only, not philosophy too.




[This message has been edited by Andrew Frisardi (edited August 28, 2008).]

[Janice D. Soderling]

It is indeed a huge subject but the very breadth opens a discourse to many directions.

Aware of my many knowledge gaps,I hesitate open this commentary, but I will say, that over the years I have been inspired to writing poetry (and sometimes fiction) by reading both philosophy and poetry. Sometimes the result acquired had a form and content wherein only I would recognize the source of the poem. I am not claiming that the results have been brilliant, but the impetus has certainly been provided by philosophy as well as by reading other poets.

I am going to think more about this and will return with something more concrete (if "concrete" is an acceptable term in this context. .) Names and thoughts and inspiration is what I mean.

I know that Eratosphere has many scholarly members who can make outstanding comments on the subject. I'm certainly looking forward to following the progression of this thread.

This was so well-put, Andrew.

philosophy uses abstract language and reason, usually, whereas poetry for the most part uses imagination and figurative language. The philosopher aims to state truth apart from the stamp of his or her personality, the poet's truth has personality stamped into the language itself

[Andrew Frisardi]

Thanks, Janice. That's interesting what you say about embedding the philosophical background in your writing so that it's more or less invisible on the surface (I think that's what you meant in your posting). Many good writers do that. I'm thinking of Richard Wilbur right now but there are lots. In his famous poem "Love Calls Us to the Things of This World," the only explicit trace of philosophical reading is in the title itself, which is a quote from Augustine. But the rest is a concretization of the idea, an embodiment of it. That's why, although I enjoy reading philosophy, I like poetry more--embodied thought leaves a much more vivid impression. At the same time, philosophy can help to vaporize what's too concrete.

The alchemical formula "dissolve and coagulate" might be seen as describing the tension between thought and representation.

Editing back in to add: I know what you mean about gaps in knowledge! Christ, I'm more gaps than knowledge in this. I'm just fishing around in GT to get some leads!



[This message has been edited by Andrew Frisardi (edited August 28, 2008).]

[Mike Todd]

There are at least two kinds of philosophical poem. The first kind advances a particular philosophy or ideal. The second expresses a love of wisdom. Some poems do both. The metaphysical sense, the sense of essence—that which Stevens labels "incandescence of the intelligence"—is impossible, I think, without philosophía, without the expression of love.

Stevens is a great poet, but I often think the philosophy in his poems expresses not so much a love of wisdom as a lust—a barely contained craving for psychical beauty. There is a sense in which the sometimes genteel surfaces of his poems really are surfaces only.

One of the high points of philosophical poetry for me is Frost's My November Guest. Having once read it immediately after finishing Boethius' Consolation, I have never been able to read it since without being moved to tears.

[wendy v]

I think it was my early, sort've obsessive readings in both western
and eastern philosophy brought me to poetry, too. In recent years when I'm in high lyric
mode, when I'm just ambushed by the poem -- I find myself moving from
observation to assertion, and feeling afterwards that I've touched
closer to my own sense of aesthetic. At the very least I feel less
wariness of producing what might be called lyrical argument. It's a
heady feeling and one I suspect Stevens became addicted to. Lust, vs
love of wisdom is a wonderful way to put it. Still, if it's assumed
the lyric and the mystic and inquiry are of the same origins, it's helpful to
remember that the greatest mystics were serious philosophers/teachers, and not
just observers of the world, as poets ( ie 'witnesses') often are.
Frost and Wilbur both strike me as grounded in, and transcendent of,
philosophy. Andrew, while I'm here, I've been meaning to tell you I
simply relished the History of Light. A marvelous book with images and ideas I'm still absorbing.

I confess a tendency toward reading the ded, so I wonder who it is
that people here would consider the credible living philosophers.
Annie Dillard, (no fluff nature-writer, she) springs to my mind,
though I can't emphasize enough that I don't mean her poems, or the
novels.

[Andrew Frisardi]

Glad you liked that History of Light book, Wendy.

Thanks for that Frost reference, Mike.

About philosophers at present, I don't know. I do like Annie Dillard. Of 20th century philosophers Heidegger and Husserl are best for poetry. Also Gaston Bachelard!

Yeats wrote at the end of his life, "Man can embody truth but he cannot know it." For me, that sums it up. Thinking with the marrow bone.

I like philosophy that can help me do that better.

[Mark Allinson]

Ah, philosophy!

So precious little of it around these days.

Thank you, Andrew, for this thread.

We are all philosophers and metaphysicians, but many of us in an inchoate, even unconscious way.

It is usually accepted that western philosophy more or less starts with Plato (although many earlier Greek thinkers are also significant). And who does Plato most quote and argue with in the Dialogues? A poet.

"Homer is by far the most quoted author in the dialoges: of the 296 quotations listed by L Brandwood in his "Word Index to Plato" for the 28 dialogues I include in my tetralogies, 131 come from Homer, 93 of which come from the Iliad, and 38 come from the Odyssey (explicit quotations as well as obviously homeric expressions); far behind, we find, aside from Protagoras whose statement on "man-measure" is quoted or alluded to 19 times, Hesiod and Euripides, with 16 quotations each, then Pindar, with 13 quotations and Aeschylus with 12 quotations; the remaining quotations come from a multitude of known and unknown authors, only a few of whom are quoted more than once. Aside from explicit quotations and use of homeric expressions, the name of Homer appears 164 times in the dialogues."
http://plato-dialogues.org/biblio.htm

And so one could argue that, since Plato builds his philosophical system on and around Homer, western philosophy begins with poetry.

Somewhere along the way, poetry and philosophy parted company, but I think they belong together.

[Mary Meriam]

Language is a form of human reason, which has its internal logic of which man knows nothing.
-Claude Levi-Strauss

[R. Nemo Hill]

Yes, Andrew, Bachelard is a must read philosopher for poets! I am often startled by how many people have never heard of him. And I agree about Heidegger as well, whose writing I think is often unintelligible to all but poets.

Goethe is another explicitly philosophical poet.
And Holderlin, though more eccentrically so.

Nemo

[Mark Allinson]

The main trouble with philosophy today is that it concerns only half of the human condition – the intellectual, rational or “spiritual” part of our being. But while many today would prefer to think that we are only our rational minds, the fact is our emotional, sensual body is left out of the picture. What poetry adds to philosophy is this missing half.

One of my all-time favourite philosophical poems is the Tao Te Ching, and its
“polar vision” – the Yin and Yang of experience.

Being and non-being create each other.
Difficult and easy support each other.
Long and short define each other.
High and low depend on each other.
Before and after follow each other. (2)


We join spokes together in a wheel,
but it is the centre hole
that makes the wagon move.

We shape clay into a pot,
but it is the emptiness inside
that holds whatever we want.

We hammer wood for a house,
but it is the inner space
that makes it liveable.

We work with being,
but non-being is what we use. (11)


This poem teaches the necessity of this fundamental polarity in life – that the Yang intellect needs to acknowledge its Yin counterpole in the somatic psyche. Poetry integrates and completes abstract philosophy.