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.