Thinking Through Poetry

This is a work of and about literary criticism. Its title signals a contribution to debates about reading. We think “through”—“by means of,” “with”—poems, sympathetically elaborating their surfaces. We “think through” poems to their end—solving a problem, getting to their roots. And we “think through” to “go beyond,” in a philosophical, speculative criticism to which the poem carries us. All three meanings of “through” are in play throughout. The subtitle applies “field” first to Romantic studies—offering new readings of canonical British Romantic poems to address contemporary topics (depth vs. surface, formalism’s return, materialism, theory vs. history of lyric), and narrating, enacting, and conceptualizing the arc of the field’s scholarship since the 1980s. Examples are drawn especially from Wordsworth, but also from Coleridge and, for Romanticism’s afterlife, from Stevens. In addition, “field” indicates the shift during that time-span from a unitary to a field-concept of form, a concept that synthesizes form and history, privileges analytic scale, and displaces entity (text) by “relation” as object of investigation. Connecting early 19th-century intellectual trends to antecedents in Spinoza and related 20th/21st-century revolutions in the postclassical sciences, the book introduces new models to literary study. Unlike accounts of science’s influence on literature, or various “literature + X” approaches (literature and ecology, literature and cognitive science), it constructs its object in a way cognate with work in non-humanities disciplines, thus highlighting a certain unity to knowledge. The claim is that literary critics can renew understanding of their own field by studying the thinking of certain scientific communities.

• Lyric Embarrassment and the Phenomenology of Alterity in Keats’s Two Odes on Art

  David Lo•Études anglaises•2020

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• Introduction

  Jacob Jewusiak•Poetics Today•2023

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