and an Emerson essay. At the same time, the focus on the rhetorical dimen-
sion of a given text inevitably downplays the cognitive import of the poetic
construct. Rhetoric, Michel Meyer argues in an interesting study, ®ourishes
where ideologies fail, or, in Nancy S. Struever’s words, it “reveals a deep com-
mitment to question/response formations as more fundamental than con-
cepts of referentiality in discursive exchange.”^9 This points the way to the
second frame for literary study.
(2) From Plato to Heidegger and Levinas, the poetic has often been under-
stood as a branch of philosophy, and hence as a potential expression of truth
and knowledge. Because poetry couldn’t pass Plato’s truth test—even Homer
told false and salacious stories about the gods—the poets were ostensibly
banished from the Republic. I will have more to say of this below, but for the
moment, I note only that this conception of poetry is antithetical to the ¤rst.
If the main purpose of a literary text is to convey knowledge or formulate
truths, questions of form and genre take a backseat. Arthur Rimbaud’s aban-
donment of the alexandrine, for example, in favor of free verse and then
prose poetry would matter much less than the visionary content of those
dense and oblique Rimbaldian texts, verse, or prose. Again, if theories of
poetry-as-rhetoric regard James Joyce and Ezra Pound as key modernists, the
theory of poetry-as-philosophy would (and has) put Samuel Beckett or Paul
Celan at that center.
The treatment of poetry as truth or knowledge has produced some mar-
velous criticism, especially in the Romantic period and again after the Sec-
ond World War, when Heidegger came to prominence; but it has its own
problems, perhaps most notably that it favors a limited corpus of literature at
the expense of all others—the lyric of Wordsworth and Shelley, for example,
at the expense of, say, a Jane Austen novel, which doesn’t lend itself to com-
parable philosophical re®ection. Then, too—and I will have more to say on
this below—the equation of poetry and philosophy tends to shortchange the
former: when a given artwork is seen to exemplify or illustrate, say, Adorno’s
aesthetic theory or Althusser’s theory of interpellation, its heterogeneity is
ignored, the pedagogical aim being one of exempli¤cation rather than re-
spect for the poem’s own ontology.
(3) From antiquity to the present, poetry has also been classi¤ed as one of
the arts (this time Aristotle is more important than Plato). In this con¤gu-
ration, poetry is placed in the context of the visual arts, music, dance, archi-
tecture, and so on. In the Ion, Plato argued that the practice of poetry in-
volves techné kai episteme. Techné was the standard Greek word both for a
Literary Study for the Twenty-first Century 7