Digital Commons@RISD Home > Division of Liberal Arts > Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive) > Vol. 23 (2025)
Abstract
This article draws connections between formal poetry and the capacity to imagine not just the actual world, but any possible world as essentially peopled and peopled with others: both human and nonhuman intelligences. Beginning with an anecdote from the fringes of science, the author goes on to identify the presence of social thought in Romantic literary worlds, citing canonical poems that rely on the recursion of metrical lines such as “Mont Blanc” (Percy Bysshe Shelley) and “Kubla Khan” (Samuel Taylor Coleridge). A theory of poetic lines is then proffered in which poetic invention is related strongly to the idea of the line as a self-sufficient way of ordering thought. From the kernel of the line, both lineation and versification are seen as irreducible to poetry as an aid to “translating” social imagination. In the second section, the concept of parsimoniousness as it relates to poetic reading is introduced. Parsimony, the quality of being readable, is related to the idea that poems are involved in forming thought, and formal poems form thought that is politically alternative to what one scholar of formalism calls ‘destituent theory.’ In the third section, a theory of surface reading of poetry is defended against the sense that poems should be obscure or difficult. The concept of a “compositional cue” in poetry is introduced. These are cues that simplify and yet deepen our reading of formal poetry and help to engage us in an automated cognition that forms us into fellow creators or inceptors of verse.