Poetry and Pragmatism

Abstract

This book is based on author's T.S. Eliot lectures at University of Kent and points to a line of linguistic scepticism that runs from Emerson, through pragmatism of Willliam James, and into 20th century, with Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens and Gertrude Stein. Poirier activates a tradition for writers who have in fact not admitted of its existence, a tradition that in this study gives birth to a radically different understanding of how writing gets written and how it deserves to be read. Central to book is an exploration of what James calls the vague. Poirier argues that vagueness deserves a privileged place in our understanding of how language holds people together, without requiring their conformity to any fixed ideas of truth. The author offers a redefinition of individualism that is located less in aggression than in tentativeness, casualness and silence.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 131 citations exist upstream.