The Philosophy of Poetry

[Philosophy Now]

Roger Caldwell finds philosophy & poetry to be mutually alien.

https://philosophynow.org/issues/114/Th ... _of_Poetry

[marjoram_blues]

Hmmmph, well, well, well...
- suppose I'm gonna have to read this...

[marjoram_blues]

So, I've had a quick look over this article which is a review of:
The Philosophy of Poetry, John Gibson (Editor), Oxford University Press, £40 hb, 253pp, ISBN: 9780199603671

Roger Caldwell writes:
For over two decades I have written a good deal of poetry and poetry criticism. I have also in that period written on philosophy, and reviewed numerous philosophy books. Up to now the two activities have been conducted separately: the philosophy that I have been concerned with has had nothing to do with poetry, and the poetry I have written, although sometimes informed by philosophy (it could hardly be otherwise given the nature of my preoccupations), does not aspire to be philosophy. There are things one says in philosophy that could find no place in poetry, and vice versa. One may be both a poet and a philosopher, but not at the same time: the two belong to very different spheres of activity.
Or so I had assumed. A new collection of essays boldly entitled The Philosophy of Poetry would attempt to persuade me otherwise...

OK, he got my attention - How can he not be both a poet and a philosopher at the same time; he is what he is. And yes, one can easily bring poetry into a philosophical discussion, even if the philosophy he is concerned with ( what is that exactly ? ) has nothing to do with poetry. The poetry he has written he admits is 'informed by philosophy' - does this mean: based on knowledge of philosophy? 'Given the nature of [his] preoccupations' - what are they again? Philosophy of ?
I get the feeling that Roger Caldwell doth protest too much. And is it the case that the aim of 'The Philosophy of Poetry' is an 'attempt to persuade [him] [us] that one can be both a poet and a philosopher...or is it so much more than that? See Amazon !

Let's find out more about this reviewer:
Roger Caldwell a poet living in Essex. His latest poetry collection, Setting Out for the Mad Islands is out now from Shoestring Press.

http://londongrip.co.uk/2016/05/london- ... -caldwell/

Rosie Johnston hears a range of voices in Roger Caldwell’s elegant and witty poems

At the age of sixteen, Roger Caldwell answered the family’s front door and found two senior police officers on the doorstep. Some poems he’d had published reminded them of a murder under investigation and they wanted a word. It did not take them long to realise that Caldwell’s poems were the work of teenage imagination – he was not their culprit – but the experience left him with a powerful sense of poetry’s consequences.

Little wonder he wrote in 1993 (in Philosophy Now magazine) that this loss of his ‘poetic virginity’ inhibited his ability to write about his inmost self. This may explain why so many of the poems in Setting Out for the Mad Islands (subtitled ‘Poems of Two Decades’) are highly polished dramatic monologues in voices ranging from Auden to Woolf.

Caldwell revels in the territory between what we say and what we mean.

Here in ‘The Velvet Band: A Tale from the Fin de Siecle’, we are at a diplomatic dinner table: The doctor on her right /will only speak in English (or what he considers to be English), even his moustache/ is resolutely Anglo-Saxon. To her left the Chinese parable is still drawling on, although by now/ more hesitant and fragmentary than before, through intermittent teeth.

Caldwell then moves his exploration of nuance deftly into this woman’s marriage:
Her husband, she’s aware, can’t keep his eyes/ Away from her: he knows she’s looking at her best tonight and will maybe never look as good again. / He suspects that she’s discovered something....

In the middle of Caldwell’s stroll through human history, he reverts to dramatic monologues, given this time to Jerome K Jerome, Henry James, Woolf, Greene and Auden, as if our story is not complete without the voices of writers.

In ‘Virginia Woolf in War-time’, parody is difficult to avoid but the poem arrives beautifully as Woolf wrestles with the impact of war:

I shan’t go hunting shoes again
at a Fortnum’s sale, or stroll down Regent Street,
won’t be searching for whitebait in Selfridges,
since even simply shelling peas
now seems like a sort of sacrament,
as in the Sussex countryside
I meet war, and literature, and middle age,
and know that, if writing’s a difficult art,
then so is that of living, loving, dying.

[...]

In the third section the poet’s own voice [Caldwell]seems to emerge more...

If we had more style than substance
I at least have neither now, live in a world grown sour,
without panache, where nothing’s black or white that is not grey,

Is this the poet himself at last? Impossible to tell but, as he says, what does it matter? Whatever the truth, Caldwell always writes with elegance and wit.

So, Caldwell seems to shrug off the question of his expressing his own voice.
And yet, it his voice we hear all through this review.
To me, it speaks volumes of the interaction between self, philosophy and poetry. Intriguing complexity, no simple separation.
Perhaps, it speaks of fear and denial...I am not what I speak...
But sometimes, you are...

[marjoram_blues]

Oh yes, about the book - it sounds interesting with essays from all sorts.' Look Inside' Amazon feature is available.
At £40 - or even £34.99 - I won't be buying.