New Literary History

This essay is one of the first to explore the implications of the emerging philosophy known as object-oriented ontology (OOO) for the study and creation of poetry. OOO provides a powerful conceptual toolbox for understanding how poetry works. Furthermore, poetry itself may be seen as a template for understanding how any entity—a human, a ball of string, a star cluster—can interact with any other—a toaster, an octopus, an abandoned warehouse. This is because OOO's theory of causality reserves a very unique and powerful place for the aesthetic dimension. In this essay, I read Percy Shelley's A Defence of Poetry in light of OOO.