Thought and Poetry: Essays on Romanticism, Subjectivity, and Truth by John Koethe (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Thought and Poetry: Essays on Romanticism, Subjectivity, and Truth by John Koethe John Gibson Thought and Poetry: Essays on Romanticism, Subjectivity, and Truth. By John Koethe. London: Bloomsbury, 2022. John Koethe is rare among philosophers. He is an accomplished poet who has also produced excellent work on issues to do with skepticism, metaphysics, and the nature of the mind and self. In other words, he has had two careers, an academic one as an analytic philosopher working on the problems that define philosophy in the Anglophone academy, and a largely extra-academic one as a poet of practice and not profession. This, he tells us, has been a healthy arrangement, since it has allowed his poetry to issue “from an impulse internal to the poetic act” rather than “from pressures external to it” (65). After reading this superb book, one is inclined to say that the same is true of his academic career, since as a philosopher he has worked largely outside the culture of professional aesthetics and philosophy of art, and one suspects that his relative indifference to the debates that animate academic work in these disciplines is in good part responsible for the immense success of Thought and Poetry. The majority of the book’s eighteen chapters were revised after publication elsewhere, and the appendix on the mind-body problem, written especially for this volume, usefully situates many of Koethe’s claims about the role of subjectivity in lyric poetry in a broader and richer philosophical context. The chapters touch on a wide range of issues in criticism, poetics, and philosophy. The most exciting discussions in the book are concerned with the legacy of romanticism and the picture of the self implicit in the strands of modernism that grow out of it; the nature of the sublime; the allure of philosophical realism; and the relationship between poetry and philosophy. While there is the kind of frequent repetition one would expect of a volume of collected essays, each retelling appears in a new context and functions to add definition to the core ideas in Koethe’s philosophy of poetry. Koethe is a Wittgensteinian at heart whose poetic sensibilities place him near the New York School and especially close to the Eliot-Stevens-Ashbery tradition. Most striking is Koethe’s view of the relationship between lyric subjectivity and the external, extra-poetic world. Koethe’s account of this relation flows from his decidedly modernist sense of the anxieties and interests of the variations of romanticism that interest him—that is, lyric poetry that involves “the enactment of subjectivity, and the affirmation of it against the claims of an objective natural setting which threatens to annihilate it” (73). It is this threat of annihilation that takes on particular significance for Koethe, since it prompts a form of lyric expression that seeks to define the self against an “objective” setting and thereby to assert a form of aesthetic and moral freedom from it. What poetic enactments of this process illuminate, at root, is the inescapability of a certain view of the self that is philosophically untenable yet so basic to our own self-conception that its dramatization alone is of value, even [End Page 253] if it rehearses an effort of thought that never pulls off the metaphysical trick it sets for itself: the actual establishment of the self as transcendent of this objective order. Such a view is dualistic, for it sees the self as distinct in ontological kind from the natural world—in effect, a purely psychological subject that animates an immaterial “interior world” of thought and feeling. As a Wittgensteinian, Koethe sees this metaphysical subject as a myth, but one that is so engrained in altogether basic features of human experience as to constitute an illusion that is a crucial aspect of how we hang together as feeling, thinking, valuing, and feeling beings: “these illusions are powerful and pervasive, engendered by systems of interpersonal, social, and political arrangements and institutions that they in turn help justify and maintain” (24). In short, this myth is essential to our concept of a person, and the form of romanticism that matters to Koethe’s poetics is one in which the...