Things Merely Are: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens

This book is an invitation to read poetry. Simon Critchley argues that poetry enlarges life with a range of observation, power of expression and attention to language that eclipses any other medium. In a rich engagement with the poetry of Wallace Stevens, Critchley reveals that poetry also contains deep and important philosophical insight. Above all, he agues for a 'poetic epistemology' that enables us to think afresh the philosophical problem of the relation between mind and world, and ultimately to cast the problem away. Drawing astutely on Kant, the German and English Romantics and Heidegger, Critchley argues that through its descriptions of particular things and their stubborn plainness - whether water, guitars, trees, or cats - poetry evokes the 'mereness' of things. It is this experience, he shows, that provokes the mood of calm and releases the imaginative insight we need to press back against the pressure of reality. Critchley also argues that this calm defines the cinematic eye of Terrence Malick, whose work is discussed at the end of the book.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements, Abbreviations of works by Wallace Stevens, Advice to the reader, 1. Or so we say – twenty-one propositions, 2. Poetry, philosophy and life as it is, 3. Sudden rightnesses, 4. Wallace Stevens’s intimidating thesis, 5. The twofold task of poetry, 6. The thing itself and its seasons, Conclusion, Afterword: Calm – on Terrence Malick, Thanks, Notes, Bibliography, Index

About the Author :
Simon Critchley is Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research, New York and at the University of Essex. He is the author of many books, including Very Little ... Almost Nothing and On Humour, both published by Routledge.

Review :
'Things Merely Are is very much a manifesto that aims to break the frame of philosophical thinking within the English-speaking tradition. And in the bargain Critchley gives us a fresh reading of Wallace Steven's work that academic literary criticism desperately needs. My hope is that this book is not just a one-trick pony but the opening of a philosophical investigation into literary modernism.' - Notre Dame Philosophical Review