ABSTRACT
I have spent much of my life arguing that American philosophers who generalize
about literary experience pay insufficient attention to lyric poetry.1 It seems so
much more relevant to deal with narrative fictions, since they open directly on
the actual world without the degree of formal mediation poems involve. These
fictions also have the space and the conscience to deal directly with moral issues
that philosophers are trained to clarify and, the best of them, to deepen. But that
very ease of access may prove inseparable from a narrowness of focus. These
philosophers have to ignore how other modes of writing less blessed with direct
worldliness make use of their resources. In particular, attention to the lyric might
bring a more Nietzschean tone to what we take as the ethical values writing can
encourage, since that mode tends toward the idealization of exuberant per-
forming selves caught up in pursuits very different from narrative fiction’s
penchant for knotted ethical dilemmas. Therefore philosophers who deal only
with narrative fiction may be ignoring two important imaginative forces at play
in our literary traditions. At one pole they do not pay sufficient attention to
what Henry Staten has called ‘‘the labors writers perform in relation to their
medium,’’ with all the attendant consequences that derive from any mode of
ignoring the role of the worker.2 And at the other pole they miss what we might
call the possible ethical force that can come from reflecting on precisely how
intense concern for the constitutive elements of texts like sound, rhythm, and syntax
expand to establish exemplary modes of taking the self seriously in the world.