This book is an attempt to offer a reading of the poet s uvre that will venture beyond indeterminacy and retrieve a human struggle inscribed in the poetry. The author proposes an eclectic approach that allows the reader to see Ashbery s poetry as part of a fascinating intellectual landscape. Departing from the work of such critics as Perloff, Bloom, and Altieri, the study structures lively transactions between poetry, literary criticism, art, and the work of philosophers: Stanley Cavell, Richard Rorty, Donald Davidson, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Such background provides a theoretical platform...

This book is devoted to investigating the relationships and correspondences that hold between the poetry of Wallace Stevens and philosophy. Stevens used the aesthetically enhanced language of his poems to create inquiries into the nature of reality that parallel those conducted by philosophers. He also maintained poetry's independence from philosophy. The first part of the book contains contributions that pursue various aspects of these parallels. Here, the authors explore the relations between Stevens' poems and specific philosophical concepts or the thought of individual philosophers. The...