Introduction: Thinking Poetry

In his most recent book, George Steiner summarises his central concern as ‘the poetry of thought and equally the thought of poetry.’ ¹ In an account of literature which is profoundly shaped by the thought of Heidegger, Steiner is at pains to demonstrate the inseparability of form and content, of literary style and what it articulates: ‘in both philosophy and literature style is substance,’ he declares, and ‘all philosophy is style. No philosophic proposition outside formal logic is separable from its semantic means and context. Nor is it totally translatable…’. ² This residual untranslatability gives the clue to what it might mean to describe poetry as a kind of ‘thinking’, for by this we mean not just that poetry provides a medium in which to articulate ideas but that its particular formal features—rhythm, metre, syntax, musicality, image, and so forth—offer a singular potentiality for ways of thinking that lie outside or in opposition to those determined by ‘ordinary’ propositional language. In this respect, the very notion of literary style becomes deeply ambiguous, signalling at once a model invoking generic expectations and a deviation from any such norm. As Antoine Compagnon observes, ‘Deeply ambivalent, the word [“style”] designates both the infinite diversity of individuals and the regular classification of species.’ With romanticism, of course, the balance shifts sharply from ‘genre’ to ‘genius’ as the primary determinant of ‘style’, ³ and this association of literary form with individual signature persists in the experimental modes of modernism, as free verse supplants conventional prosodies: ‘A man’s rhythm,’ declares Ezra Pound, ‘must be interpretative, it will be, therefore, in the end, his own, uncounterfeiting, uncounterfeitable’. ⁴