Poetic Difficulty and Epistemic Authority

Abstract

Whatever an analytic philosophy of poetry is, one achieves a sense of it by exploring the debates that animate it, which is likely all that constitutes its identity as a field. To give a sense of what is ›analytic‹ about these debates, I explore two topics that enlist poetry to approach issues of general interest in core areas of analytic philosophy: meaning and the self, with particular emphasis on motivating a concept of meaning-as-aboutness. I will suggest that, contrary to common practice, we ought to approach these two debates as implicitly linked, since this helps bring to our attention a matter that should be more central to contemporary philosophy of poetry: a statement of how lyrically-mediated self-images tell us something interesting about the relationship between language and personhood. That is, I outline how these recent debates can help shed light on what philosophers like to call the ›cognitive value‹ of poetry, which is to say, its ability to communicate, through poetic form itself, forms of understanding of the world and human predicament.