Poetry

In this article I develop Heidegger's phenomenology of poetry, showing that it may provide grounds for rejecting claims that he lapses into linguistic idealism. Proceeding via an analysis of the three concepts of language operative in the philosopher's work, I demonstrate how poetic language challenges language's designative and world-disclosive functions. The experience with poetic language, which disrupts Dasein's absorption by emerging out of equipmentality in the mode of the broken tool, brings Dasein to wonder at the world's existence in such (...) a way that doubt about its reality cannot enter the picture. (shrink)

This article begins by noting the tendency of certain academic practices to arrest thought, and attempts to circumvent that arrestation in the writer by reflecting on her adolescent response to the writings of William Wordsworth. It explores the possible implications of a youthful feeling that poetry is ‘true’, tying this in with Wordsworth’s own writing about poetry and truth, and with a particular passage from Wordsworth’s Home at Grasmere which once prompted that youthful feeling. The personal and particular sources from (...) which affective responses to poetry are often drawn are noted, and prosody is put forward as one of the most important among these sources, firstly for the present writer and then for Wordsworth himself. It finishes by contemplating the loss of that youthful response to poetry, and the implications of that loss for thinking. (shrink)

Robert Abrams argues that new concepts of space and landscape emerged in mid-nineteenth-century American writing, marking a linguistic and interpretative limit to American expansion. Abrams supports the radical elements of antebellum writing, where writers from Hawthorne to Rebecca Harding Davis disputed the naturalizing discourses of mid-nineteenth century society. Whereas previous critics find in antebellum writing a desire to convert chaos into an affirmative, liberal agenda, Abrams contends that authors of the 1840s and 50s deconstructed more than they constructed.

Arboles en la musica, a collection of poems by Spanish poet Amparo Amoros, is analyzed poem by poem, as a close reading. ;The analysis is thematic in nature and is done in light of the collection's feminist and spiritual tendencies which are opposed to scientism and other characteristics of the modern Western world. The poems reflect a subtext of Biblical and mystical inspiration, beginning with a description of the natural world and ending with a liberation of the individual spirit and (...) a transcendence of death. A poem from another of Amoros' collections is also discussed since its significance complements the philosophy revealed in Arboles en la musica. The conclusion studies Amoros' view of art through her poem "Transfiguracion.". (shrink)

Oedipus the tyrant and the limits of political rationalism -- Blind faith and enlightened statesmanship in Oedipus at colonus -- The pious heroism of Antigone -- Conclusion: Nietzsche, Plato, and Aristotle on philosophy and tragedy.