Introduction: The Form of Love Poetry, Philosophy, and the Closeness of Loving Reading

This introduction shows how The Form of Love joins conversations about whether and how literature in general and poetry in particular can think distinctively. Philosophers, critics, and poets often invoke familiar—and useful—contrasts to distinguish poetry from philosophy: the particular versus the abstract, pleasure versus explanation, form versus matter or truth. Such helpful, if contestable, considerations can remain rather general, and when they do engage concretely with how poems think distinctively, they tend not to give poems the slow regard needed to reveal the full amplitude of how poetic form enables novel conceptions of love. Endeavoring to give John Donne’s “Batter my heart” this kind of attention, the introduction risks what could look like a conservative focus on texts in hopes of revealing what is most radical about those texts. It also outlines a form of loving reading that might be uncritical or anti-critical (or at least postcritical), in hopes of showing how poetry thinks as other forms of thought cannot.