Philosophy as Verse-Performance: five poems and a formalist prospectus

Abstract

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This article consists of five poems and an introductory essay. The poems are intended on the one hand to make a case for the currently underrated virtues of poetic formalism, i.e., for the revival of rhyme and meter as aspects of poetic practice. On the other they argue for a distinctly philosophical mode of poetry that embraces the values of conceptual or rational discourse as against a romantic-modernist conception premised on the intrinsic superiority of lyric, metaphor, symbol, analogy, and suchlike touchstone values. These issues are laid out programmatically in the opening essay and developed in a more performative as well as formal way in the five poems.

Keywords

• formalism
• meter
• literary theory
• Mallarmé
• modernism
• poetics
• poetry
• post-structuralism
• rhyme
• Wittgenstein