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Poetry and the Fate of the Senses
What is the role of the senses in the creation and reception of poetry? How does poetry carry on the long tradition of making experience and suffering understood by others? With Poetry and the Fate of the Senses , Susan Stewart traces the path of the aesthetic in search of an explanation for the role of poetry in our culture. The task of poetry, she tells us, is to counter the loneliness of the mind, or to help it glean, out of the darkness of solitude, the outline of others. Poetry, she contends, makes tangible, visible, and audible the contours of our shared humanity. It sustains and transforms the threshold between individual and social existence.
Herself an acclaimed poet, Stewart not only brings the intelligence of a critic to the question of poetry, but the insight of a practitioner as well. Her new study draws on reading from the ancient Greeks to the postmoderns to explain how poetry creates meanings between persons. Poetry and the Fate of the Senses includes close discussions of poems by Stevens, Hopkins, Keats, Hardy, Bishop, and Traherne, of the sense of vertigo in Baroque and Romantic works, and of the rich tradition of nocturnes in visual, musical, and verbal art. Ultimately, Stewart explores the pivotal role of poetry in contemporary culture. She argues that poetry can counter the denigration of the senses and can expand our imagination of the range of human expression.
Poetry and the Fate of the Senses won the 2004 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in Memory of Newton Arvin, administered for the Truman Capote Estate by the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. It also won the Phi Beta Kappa Society's 2002 Christian Gauss Award for Literary Criticism.
Herself an acclaimed poet, Stewart not only brings the intelligence of a critic to the question of poetry, but the insight of a practitioner as well. Her new study draws on reading from the ancient Greeks to the postmoderns to explain how poetry creates meanings between persons. Poetry and the Fate of the Senses includes close discussions of poems by Stevens, Hopkins, Keats, Hardy, Bishop, and Traherne, of the sense of vertigo in Baroque and Romantic works, and of the rich tradition of nocturnes in visual, musical, and verbal art. Ultimately, Stewart explores the pivotal role of poetry in contemporary culture. She argues that poetry can counter the denigration of the senses and can expand our imagination of the range of human expression.
Poetry and the Fate of the Senses won the 2004 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in Memory of Newton Arvin, administered for the Truman Capote Estate by the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. It also won the Phi Beta Kappa Society's 2002 Christian Gauss Award for Literary Criticism.
458 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2002
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About the author
Susan Stewart
91 books69 followersSusan Stewart (born 1952) is an American poet, university professor and literary critic.
Professor Stewart holds degrees from Dickinson College (B.A. in English and Anthropology), the Johns Hopkins University (M.F.A. in Poetics) and the University of Pennsylvania (Ph.D. in Folklore). She teaches the history of poetry, aesthetics, and the philosophy of literature, most recently at Princeton University.
Her poems have appeared in many journals including: The American Poetry Review, The Paris Review, Poetry, Tri-Quarterly, Gettysburg Review, Harper's, Georgia Review, Ploughshares, and Beloit Poetry Journal.
In the late 2000s she collaborated with composer James Primosch on a song cycle commissioned by the Chicago Symphony that premiered in the fall of 2009. She has served on the judging panel of the Wallace Stevens Award on six occasions.
In 2005 Professor Stewart was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
About her work, the poet and critic Allen Grossman has written, "Stewart has built a poetic syntax capable of conveying an utterly singular account of consciousness, by the light of which it is possible to see the structure of the human world with a new clarity and an unforeseen precision, possible only in her presence and by means of her art."
(from Wikipedia)
Professor Stewart holds degrees from Dickinson College (B.A. in English and Anthropology), the Johns Hopkins University (M.F.A. in Poetics) and the University of Pennsylvania (Ph.D. in Folklore). She teaches the history of poetry, aesthetics, and the philosophy of literature, most recently at Princeton University.
Her poems have appeared in many journals including: The American Poetry Review, The Paris Review, Poetry, Tri-Quarterly, Gettysburg Review, Harper's, Georgia Review, Ploughshares, and Beloit Poetry Journal.
In the late 2000s she collaborated with composer James Primosch on a song cycle commissioned by the Chicago Symphony that premiered in the fall of 2009. She has served on the judging panel of the Wallace Stevens Award on six occasions.
In 2005 Professor Stewart was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
About her work, the poet and critic Allen Grossman has written, "Stewart has built a poetic syntax capable of conveying an utterly singular account of consciousness, by the light of which it is possible to see the structure of the human world with a new clarity and an unforeseen precision, possible only in her presence and by means of her art."
(from Wikipedia)
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
March 8, 2017
sl;dkfjsd;lfkj;flkjdf;lksdjfdls;kfj; oh my god
July 10, 2020
frustrating -- but that brilliant chapter on anne finch!
February 27, 2025
im back on goodreads friends. read this for a paper
March 31, 2009
I had high expectations for this book -- high enough that when I got halfway through and realized I hadn't internalized anything Stewart had said, I started over at the beginning and took notes to keep me focused. And for that first half, it payed off. Stewart has lucid and interesting thoughts tracing the history of the various senses in literature, and the ways in which they show up in poetry.
Unfortunately, I thought the book lost focus in the second half. There were entire chapters that left me wondering how it related back to her basic points on senses, interpersonal relation and deixis, or even what conclusions Stewart was trying to draw at all. The last chapter is worth reading at the beginning, perhaps, because it lays out at least what Stewart saw as connective tissue.
Ultimately, I'm more disappointed because the book started out so strongly than critical of how it ended. It's not bad, but if I were recommending it, I might suggest only reading the first few chapters.
Unfortunately, I thought the book lost focus in the second half. There were entire chapters that left me wondering how it related back to her basic points on senses, interpersonal relation and deixis, or even what conclusions Stewart was trying to draw at all. The last chapter is worth reading at the beginning, perhaps, because it lays out at least what Stewart saw as connective tissue.
Ultimately, I'm more disappointed because the book started out so strongly than critical of how it ended. It's not bad, but if I were recommending it, I might suggest only reading the first few chapters.
Currently reading
August 5, 2008I only have one chapter from this which was photocopied for a class on Interart/Intermedial Theory, but I've enjoyed that one chapter quite a bit. I need to buy the whole book and get through it. I don't remember if there was an explicit connection, but for some reason I associate this book with a guest lecture by Regina Bendix for the Dundes memorial series where Bendix got into the "sensorium" and the problematic nature of an intersubjective world, bridging the gap between individual experiences. Anyway, good book, sometimes a bit hard to follow, but I've no real complaints.
Update-- now have a copy of the book, and am very very slowly getting through the first chapter. Like it, but don't have much time to read these days.
Update-- now have a copy of the book, and am very very slowly getting through the first chapter. Like it, but don't have much time to read these days.
August 4, 2011
Liking this so far....absolutely not written in the plain style, and sometimes she's really a little too in love with her own way of saying some kinda obvious things, also a little too 'western' i guess, for me - I'm in the first section which is all kinda 'lightness/darkness' metaphors, but it's got some really awesome stuff on the Iliad.
February 23, 2008
Not her best. "On Longing" stands as one of the strangest, most beautifully-written works of literary criticism there is, and "Crimes of Writing" runs a close second.
March 18, 2016
Wonderful prose, very evocative, especially the first two chapters...
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews