This collection brings together some of the most prominent critics of contemporary poetry and some of the most significant poets working in the English language today, to offer a critical assessment of the nature and function of poetic thought. Working at once with questions of form, literary theory and philosophy, this volume gives an extraordinarily diverse, original and mobile account of the kind of thinking that poetry can do. The conviction that moves through the collection as a whole is that poetry is not an addition to thought, nor a vehicle to express a given idea, nor an...