Poetry's Knowing Ignorance

What kind of knowledge, if any, does poetry provide? Poets make poems, but they also make meaning and craft a kind of learned and creative ignorance as they provide infinitely revisable answers to the question of what poetry is. That question of poetry''s definition invites broader ones about the relationship of poetry to other lived experience. Poetry thus implies something like a way of life that is resistant to definitive statements and conclusions, and the creation of communities of readers and writers that live in ever-renewed questioning. To resist concluding is to embrace a kind of productive ignorance, a knowledge that is first and foremost aware of poetic knowledge''s own limits. shows, through an examination of French poetry, how it is this dialogue in response to a constant questioning, to an answer-turned-question, that continues to blur the boundary between poetry and writing about poetry, between poetry and criticism, and between poetry and other kinds of experience.>

About the author

Joseph Acquisto is Professor of French at the University of Vermont, USA. His books include Reading Baudelaire with Adorno: Subjectivity, Dissonance, Transcendence (Bloomsbury 2023), Proust, Music, and Meaning: Theories and Practices of Listening in the Recherche (2017), and The Fall Out of Redemption: Writing and Thinking Beyond Salvation in Baudelaire, Cioran, Fondane, Agamben, and Nancy (Bloomsbury 2015).

Product details

• Authors: Joseph Acquisto, Joseph (Chair Acquisto
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 30.09.2019
• EAN: 9781501355226
• ISBN: 978-1-5013-5522-6
• No. of pages: 224
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > Romance linguistics / literary studies; Französisch, Literaturwissenschaft: Lyrik und Dichter, LITERARY CRITICISM / Poetry, LITERARY CRITICISM / European / French, Literature - Classics / Criticism, LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 20th Century