In recent years philosophers have produced important books on nearly all the major arts: the novel and painting, music and theatre, dance and architecture, conceptual art and even gardening. Poetry is the sole exception. This is an astonishing omission, one this collection of original essays will correct. If contemporary philosophy still regards metaphors such as 'Juliet is the sun' as a serious problem, one has an acute sense of how prepared it is to make philosophical and aesthetic sense of poems such W. B. Yeats's 'The Second Coming', Sylvia Plath's 'Daddy', or Paul Celan's 'Todesfuge'. The Philosophy of Poetry brings together philosophers of art, language, and mind to expose and address the array of problems poetry raises for philosophy. In doing so it lays the foundation for a proper philosophy of poetry, setting out the various puzzles and paradoxes that future work in the field will have to address. Given its breadth of approach, the volume is relevant not only to aesthetics but to all areas of philosophy concerned with meaning, truth, and the communicative and expressive powers of language more generally. Poetry is the last unexplored frontier in contemporary analytic aesthetics, and this volume offers a powerful demonstration of how central poetry should be to philosophy.

The first study of poetic language from a historical and philosophical perspectiveIn a series of 12 chapters, exemplary poems - by Walter Ralegh, John Milton,William Cowper, William Wordsworth, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, Frank O'Hara, Robert Creeley, W. S. Graham, Tom Raworth, Denise Riley and Thomas A. Clark - are read alongside theoretical discussions of poetic language. The discussions provide a jargon-free account of a wide range of historical and contemporary schools of thought about poetic language, and an organised, coherent critique of those schools (including analytical philosophy, cognitive poetics, structuralism and post-structuralism). Via close readings of poems from 1600 to the present readers are taken through a wide range of styles including modernist, experimental and innovative poetries. Paired chapters within a chronological structure allow lecturers and students to approach the material in a variety of ways (by individual chapters, paired historical periods) that are appropriate to different courses.

Connecting poetry and philosophy of language, Philip Mills bridges the continental and analytical divide by bringing together the writings of Nietzsche and Wittgenstein. Through an expressivist philosophy of poetry, he argues that we can understand some of the core questions in the philosophy of language. Mills highlights the continuity of poetic language with ordinary language, and positions Nietzsche and Wittgenstein's thinking as the clearest way to expand the philosophy of poetry. By tracing the expressivist tradition of philosophy of language, this study locates its roots in German Romanticism right through to the work of contemporary expressivists such as Huw Price and Robert Brandom. Where poetry has been difficult to grasp with the traditional philosophical tools used by aestheticians, A Poetic Philosophy of Language operates at the crossroads between philosophy of art and language, proposing a new philosophy of poetry with wide-ranging potentialities.

Ever since Plato’s Socrates exiled the poets from the ideal city in The Republic, Western thought has insisted on a strict demarcation between philosophy and poetry. Yet might their long-standing quarrel hide deeper affinities? This book explores the distinctive ways in which twentieth-century and contemporary continental thinkers have engaged with poetry and its contribution to philosophical meaning making, challenging us to rethink how philosophy has been changed through its encounters with poetry. In wide-ranging reflections on thinkers such as Heidegger, Gadamer, Arendt, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze, Irigaray, Badiou, Kristeva, and Agamben, among others, distinguished contributors consider how different philosophers encountered the force and intensity of poetry and the negotiations that took place as they sought resolutions of the quarrel. Instead of a clash between competing worldviews, they figured the relationship between philosophy and poetry as one of productive mutuality, leading toward new modes of thinking and understanding. Spanning a range of issues with nuance and rigor, this compelling and comprehensive book opens new possibilities for philosophical poetry and the poetics of philosophy.

By exploring central issues in the philosophy of literature, illustrated by a wide range of novels, poems, and plays, Philosophy of Literature gets to the heart of why literature matters to us and sheds new light on the nature and interpretation of literary works. Provides a comprehensive study, along with original insights, into the philosophy of literature Develops a unique point of view - from one of the field's leading exponents Offers examples of key issues using excerpts from well-known novels, poems, and plays from different historical periods

The book explores the relations between Wallace Stevens' poetry and issues in general philosophy, philosophy of language, and figurativeness. The chapters move from the question of the relation between poetry and philosophy to investigating the role of metaphor in Stevens' poems.

Examines the role that poets and the poetic word play in the formation of philosophical thinking in the modern German tradition. Several of the most celebrated philosophers in the German tradition since Kant afford to poetry an all-but-unprecedented status in Western thought. Fichte, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Gadamer argue that the scope, limits, and possibilities of philosophy are intimately intertwined with those of poetry. For them, poetic thinking itself is understood as intrinsic to the kind of thinking that defines philosophical inquiry and the philosophical life, and they developed their views through extensive and sustained considerations of specific poets, as well as specific poetic figures and images. This book offers essays by leading scholars that address each of the major figures of this tradition and the respective poets they engage, including Schiller, Archilochus, Pindar, Hölderlin, Eliot, and Celan, while also discussing the poets’ contemporary relevance to philosophy in the continental tradition. Above all, the book explores an approach to language that rethinks its role as a mere tool for communication or for the dissemination of knowledge. Here language will be understood as an essential event that opens up the world in a primordial sense whereby poetry comes to have a deeply ethical significance for human beings. In this way, the volume positions ethics at the center of continental discourse, even as it engages philosophy itself as a discourse about language attuned to the rigor of what poetry ultimately expresses. “With its impressive range of both philosophers and poets, this volume opens up new avenues of thinking at the intersections of philosophy and poetry.” — Robert D. Metcalf, cotranslator of Martin Heidegger’s Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy