How is poetry a living art? This is the question at the heart of
_Poetry's Nature_. Although it is common to speak of "nature poetry,"
Stewart contends that the essential nature of poetry is bound up with
the natural world: by looking to nature, we can better understand
poetry and, in turn, our own situation within nature. The study draws
on contemporary physics and philosophy to argue that all beings, and
all matter, are enmeshed in relations to one another, and that such
processural relations can help us to think about poetry as an
ever-arriving, ever unfinished art. Based on Stewart's 2023 Clarendon
Lectures in English at the University of Oxford, the volume's four
chapters explore four paradigms that illuminate poetry's relation to
other natural phenomena: the ways poems draw on birdsong to veer
between language and sound, and hence between semantic density and
meaninglessness; the experience of seasonality as a paradigm for the
lyric's recursive use of time; the flows and forms of water as an
inspiration for the enactment and depiction of motion and rest in
poems; and, finally, the vast domain of the imperceptible as a
resource for the imagination. Her examples range from medieval lyrics
to Modernism. Poems are events that are felt in time rather than being
merely cognized; rewarding of our attention, like the natural world;
experienced, like the weather, in our bodies. By reframing poetry in
its relation to nature, _Poetry's Nature_ hopes to reframe our
relation to the world in which we live, a task that is of ever greater
urgency.
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Four Lectures
Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780192577696
Publisert
2025
Utgave
1. utgave
Utgiver
Oxford University Press Academic UK
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter