NOB's Poetics

Abstract

This article addresses the turn in Norman O. Brown's intellectual orientation during the 1960s, a reorientation reflecting his newfound alliance with poets, and an internalization of a spirit of poetry that he explicitly derived from the heady atmosphere of the 1960s counterculture. Consequently, he professed a Dionysian outlook on the body politic as a single and singular corporeality, and pledged allegiance to the rhetorical principle of paronomasia—a play on words that sound alike but have different meanings. In his final works Brown came to repeatedly affirm that “there is only poetry.”