Beginning with an essay on the history and theory of poetic argument, he traces its patterns through Romantic and Modernist literature. He divides his subject into three areas: the paradoxes of reason, language, and argument. Poetic Argument surveys the writings of the five poets in light of what has to be "proved" and identifies the characteristic styles of proof for each. For example, in the chapter on Marianne Moore, Kertzer studies two expressions of poetic argument. The first regards poetry as a waking dream, combining the powers of sleep and calculation. The second, derived from Imagism, treats poetry as a special way of seeing. Kertzer suggests that the combination of these two elements produces Moore's characteristically intricate, but inconclusive, forms of argument.

A poetry handbook rooted in theory, history, and philosophy

This volume brings together Seth Benardete's studies of Hesiod's Theogony, Homer's Iliad, and Greek tragedy, of eleven Platonic dialogues, and Aristotle's Metaphysics. These essays, some never before published, others difficult to find, span four decades of his work and document its impressive range. Benardete's philosophic reading of the poets and his poetic reading of the philosophers share a common ground that makes this collection a whole. The key, suggested by his reflections on Leo Strauss in the last piece, lies in the question of how to read Plato. Benardete's way is characterized not just by careful attention to the literary form that separates doctrine from dialogue, and speeches from deed; rather, by following the dynamic of these differences, he uncovers the argument that belongs to the dialogue as a whole. The "turnaround" such an argument undergoes bears consequences for understanding the dialogue as radical as the conversion of the philosopher in Plato's image of the cave. Benardete's original interpretations are the fruits of this discovery of the "argument of the action."

Argument and imagination are often interdependent. Martin Warner explores how this relationship bears on argument's concern with truth, not just persuasion. He argues that the rationality of argument is not only a matter of deductive validity, but can be assessed in terms of criteria drawn from the study of imaginative literature.

In Feeling as a Foreign Language, Alice Fulton considers poetry's uncanny ability to access and recreate emotions so wayward they go unnamed. Fulton contemplates topics ranging from the intricacies of a rare genetic syndrome to fractals from the aesthetics of complexity theory to the need for "cultural incorrectness." Along the way, she falls in love with an outrageous 17th century poet, argues for a Dickinsonian tradition in American letters, and calls for a courageous poetics of inconvenient knowledge.

This collection brings together some of the most prominent critics of contemporary poetry and some of the most significant poets working in the English language today, to offer a critical assessment of the nature and function of poetic thought. Working at once with questions of form, literary theory and philosophy, this volume gives an extraordinarily diverse, original and mobile account of the kind of ‘thinking’ that poetry can do. The conviction that moves through the collection as a whole is that poetry is not an addition to thought, nor a vehicle to express a given idea, nor an ornamental language in which thinking might find itself couched. Rather, all the essays suggest that poetry itself thinks, in ways that other forms of expression cannot, thus making new intellectual, political and cultural formulations possible. This book was originally published as a special issue of Textual Practice.