Defence Of Poetry Research Articles

Jahan Ramazani, A Transnational PoeticsA Transnational Poetics. Jahan Ramazani. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Pp. xvii+221.

<i>Jahan Ramazani</i>, A Transnational Poetics<i>A Transnational Poetics</i>. Jahan Ramazani. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Pp. xvii+221.

The Work of the Negative: Symbolic, Gothic, and Romantic in Shelley and Hegel

I IN A DEFENCE OF POETRY (1821), AMIDST SEVERAL CONVENTIONALLY ROMANTIC figurations of it, (1) Shelley also describes poetry as a secret alchemy that turns to potable gold poisonous waters that flow from death through life (533). The phrase marks persistence in Shelley's work of what Jerrold Hogle calls a sensibility, and points back to his second Gothic novel St. Irvyne (1811), (2) whose plot has as its absent cause alchemist Ginotti. In that novel Ginotti sees a ... borne on sweet strain of music. Like famous Brocken-spectre that so fascinated Romantics, (3) this phantasm suddenly changes into a gigantic and deformed shape (St. Irvyne, 237), anticipating Shelley's last poem, The Triumph of Life (1822). For Hogle, discussing earlier work, Shelley struggles against this 'Gothic' psyche with its oscillation between light and darkness, seeking to transform death into life, and managing to put an 'intelligent' Soul in place of vacancy through a kind of deism. (4) In this paper I will suggest a more profoundly generative relationship between Romantic and Gothic, while thinking Gothic more broadly in terms of what Shelley's contemporary Hegel calls Symbolic. For Hegel uses term in a sense almost opposite to way it is understood by Goethe and Coleridge, so as to signify an art that is premature and malformed rather than one that embodies general in particular. (5) Unusually for a period in which aesthetic was associated with beautiful, Hegel also makes a place for this art that fails to adequate[ly] embody the Idea, which can only be signified through symbols that set reader task of deciphering them without actually attaining to decipherment. (6) As a form that is adolescent and manic, Hegelian Symbolic aptly describes one side of disconnection of modes in St. Irvyne. The novel has two plots whose disjunction, lest we fail to notice it, is also marked by omission of two chapters. In main plot ostensible hero is Wolftein, though its prime mover is Ginotti, obscure symbolic figure who sanctions Wolftein's poisoning of bandit Cavigni in order to obtain lovely Megalena de Metastasio. The names are themselves significant, in this novel that egregiously confuses foreign nationalities: Ginotti suggests an Italian cunning, whereas Wolfstein's name is rough and Germanic. In main plot Ginotti functions as Mephistophelean shadow and Dark Interpreter of increasingly dissolute Wolfstein, until plot disposes of both of them in its Faustian conclusion. But novel is also sporadically intersected by a Radcliffean subplot, focused on more elegantly named Eloise, who turns out to be Wolfstein's sister, even though she is French while he is Bohemian. Eloise is seduced by casuistical Nempere, rescued by another libertine, and finally ends up marrying Fitzeustace, a Peacockian parody of typical Shelleyan Poet. This Romantic subplot fantastically escapes Gothic sensibility of main plot by which it is enveloped. For Nempere turns out to be Ginotti, which means that Nempere, though killed off in subplot, is still alive in main plot, thus casting doubt on whether his metamorphic alias Ginotti is indeed dead. But do we want to dispose of Ginotti and work of negative figured by Gothic? And do reductive conventions of Gothic, in turn, foreclose upon a certain Symbolic excess in novel? Or does novel's titular echo of Godwin's St. Leon (1799), where alchemy is also a figure for schemes of sociopolitical improvement, make Ginotti a shorthand figure for some future and as yet undigested transformation of the poisonous waters that flow from death through life (DP, 533)? Indeed before its unsatisfying conclusion, Ginotti had opened up Symbolic potential of Gothic by promising Wolfstein elixir of life. …

What Use is Poetry?

In an address to the Yale Political Union on April 23, 2013, Meena Alexander began with a line from Shelley's 1821 essay, “A Defence of Poetry.” The resolution—“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”—led to a lively debate. What follows is a slightly revised version of the text she wrote for that occasion.

Men and Women and the Arts of Love

The two most prominent topics of Robert Browning's Men and Women (1855) are love and art. The former receives less critical attention, even though, as Wendell Stacy Johnson notes, specific subject of love between men and women is the major one of this collection. Of the fifty-one pieces in the two volumes of Men and Women, more than half are about love and marriage. (1) The conspicuous role of art and artists, on the other hand, has always attracted comment; while the volumes were still in preparation, Browning wrote to a friend, am writing ... 'Lyrics,' with more music & painting than before, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning informed her sister Arabella that there will be in them a good deal of Italian art.. pictures, music. (2) The two topics are explicitly brought together in the final poem of the collection, One Word More, which serves as epilogue. Here Browning, speaking in propria persona, directly addresses the relation between art and love, and in particular he considers which of the arts is best capable of expressing human passion. Yet the question of the differing relations between love and the different forms of art is not restricted to One Word More but has implicitly been at the center of the collection all along. Men and Women thus constitutes a type of paragone. (3) The paragone was a genre of Renaissance aesthetic philosophy in which one form of art was compared to others and declared superior; notable examples include Leonardo da Vinci's treatise on painting (pub. 1651) and, in English, Sir Philip Sidney's The Defence of Poesy (pub. 1595). Very few of Browning's poems follow this model of explicitly arguing for the superiority of one art form-the exception being Abt Vogler, from the 1864 collection Dramatis Personae, to which I return at the end of this essay. But the paragone developed in later centuries so that, without declaring a single winner, the author evaluated the advantages and limitations of different arts, as G. E. Lessing does in his landmark Laocoon: On the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766). (4) This is the pattern followed by One Word More and several other poems in Men and Women, as well as by the collection as a whole, which constantly considers and distinguishes between painting, music, and poetry as expressions of love. In this way Men and Women forms one of the nineteenth century's most important investigations into the relation between aesthetic and erotic feeling. (5) The attitudes of the speakers follow an irregular yet recognizable development over the course of the collection, and in what follows I trace their shifting perceptions of the relationship between love and art. (6) At the beginning of Men and Women, perhaps surprisingly, the two are set in stark opposition: many of the earliest speakers lump all the arts together, considering them as divorced from, even antithetical to, the experience of erotic love. Gradually, however, love and art come to be seen as naturally affiliated. Notably, both are shown to be forever alternating between objective (self-conscious) and subjective (unself-conscious) modes, and both thus participate in the Browningesque paradox of success-through-failure. Various poems then highlight individual art forms, portraying the advantages and disadvantages of each for expressing different aspects of romantic love, culminating in One Word More and Browning's own decision to embody his love in verse. But Browning is, typically, less intent on reaching a single conclusion than on exploring how the varieties of art enrich our understanding of the complexities of human love. The first poem in Men and Women, Love Among the Ruins, concludes with a curt declaration: Love is best. (7) Taken out of context, as it often is, this line can be misleading. In the poem love is not being placed in a hierarchy, at the top of a scale of good things, but is rather being set in opposition to all other human achievements. …

Poet’s Responsibility as an Ecological Thinker in Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry and Snyder’s A Place in Space

Poet’s Responsibility as an Ecological Thinker in Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry and Snyder’s A Place in Space

Jacques Khalip, Anonymous Life: Romanticism and DispossessionAnonymous Life: Romanticism and Dispossession. Jacques Khalip. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009. Pp. xi+235.

<i>Jacques Khalip</i>, Anonymous Life: Romanticism and Dispossession<i>Anonymous Life: Romanticism and Dispossession</i>. Jacques Khalip. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009. Pp. xi+235.

Shelley on the Assembly Line: A Defence of the Humanities

Reading Shelley’s Defence of Poetry in the context of the financial crisis in our own day which has manifested itself in a jarring shift in research priorities towards applied knowledges, this essay argues that the case that Shelley was making, and which it has become crucial to make again, if in slightly different terms, is that poetry — or, today, the humanities — must be understood, not as the opposite but at the limit of Enlightenment thought. The epistemological and political imperatives which Shelley attributes to poetry emerge, not as a counter-enlightenment capable of negating reason’s impact or transcending the demystifying effects of critical inquiry, but rather as a kind of higher-level Enlightenment, a second-order form of knowledge about knowledge. The creative faculty enables us ‘to imagine that which we know’, in part by highlighting the ‘unapprehended relations’ within which particular innovations must be situated. It offers a potential for insight into the nature and limits of applied knowledge capable of extending the transformative power of reason (its ‘impact’) by setting reason against itself in a self-reflexive turn which, for Shelley, belongs to the province of the imagination. Few arguments could be more timely in our own day.

De anatomische les: Marsman’s ‘Poetics’ 1926 — with a Sidelong Glance at Coenen, Gorter, Emants, and the Movement of Tachtig

In 1926, Hendrik Marsman published a sequence of essays under the title De anatomische les. In these, Marsman takes the intimate relationship between an intensely lived life and art as a given, and evaluates the work of, among others, Novalis, Büchner, Trakl, and Rilke, in light of it. In an Appendix, Marsman presents what might be called his poetic programme, stressing three main topics: the relation between life and art, a definition of the work of art, and finally the effect of art (poetry) on the reader. In the case of the effect of poetry, however, Marsman shifts into a discussion of lyric poetry as a symptom of individualism; this in turn leads to an assessment of contemporary poetry, with a look back at the Tachtigers. In that movement Marsman sees a positive side to the all-pervasive individualism of modern times, leading him eventually to change his poetic practice, moving from an at times shrill ‘expressionism’ or ‘vitalism’ to a symbolist organic style, whilst continuing his defence of poetry against those who would question art’s autonomy.

Venus and Adonis: Shakespeare's Critique of Spenser

IN writing Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare could not have ignored or been ignorant of Faerie Queene. When Shakespeare published Venus and Adonis in 1593, Shefheardes Calender (1581) had long since brought Spenser acclaim and renown; Sir Philip Sidney, for example, had singled it out for praise in Defense of Poetry. In 1590, the first part of Faerie Queene appeared and was enthusiastically received. Other writers—Nashe, Harrington, Daniel, Drayton, Lodge—heaped praise upon it: printer's preface to a volume of Spenser's complaints published in 1591 describes the favorable passage Faerie Queene won from the public.1 Recently, Donald Cheney has proposed that Shakespeare viewed The Faerie Queene as his principal challenge as a poem to emulate and surpass in Venus and Adonis.2 Because of the prominence of Spenser and his work, a version of the Venus and Adonis story published three years after Part I of the epic would not only admit Spenser's poem as a source, but also stand as a critical evaluation of the Garden of Adonis, the Garden's erotic philosophy, and Spenser's Ovidianism.

Justice Is a Mirage: Failures of Religious Order in Marlowe's Tamburlaine Plays

In The Defence of Poesy, Philip Sidney declares that poetry morally useful because it can portray not only what is or not, but what should or should not (1) Unlike philosophy, which abstract, or history, which bound to record events as they happened, literature's representative and imaginative qualities allow it to create an easily comprehensible picture of virtue. Performed a year after Sidney's death (but eight years before publication of Defence), Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine plays could not be further from this moral project. The play's titular character incarcerates people in cages, kills his own son, burns an entire city to ground, forces prisoners of war to draw his chariot, and openly defies gods. While most early modern playwrights bring tyrants like Tamburlaine to violent ends, Marlowe ushers his protagonist into a comparatively comfortable death that caps off a victorious military career. Surrounded by friends, physicians, and multiple sons who can take over his empire, Tamburlaine's only regret that he has not conquered more land. Although Tamburlaine fills two plays with his acts of cruelty, he himself never experiences cruelty, even at his death. For contemporary readers accustomed to poetic justice of Duke's murder in The Revenger's Tragedy or fatal plot twist that kills Macbeth, Tamburlaine's death seems out of place with a central tradition of early modern English drama. Why a character who routinely slaughters civilians, women, and children and who treats humans like animals allowed to die unpunished? While Sidney, had he been alive, might have read Marlowe's plays as an abuse of poetry's power, I argue that plays perform a different kind of cultural work: instead of offering models of virtuous or immoral behavior, they invite spectators to critique efficacy of institutions that seek to enforce such moral codes. Tamburlaine and other characters frequently invoke justice as defined by Christianity, Islam, and paganism, but none of these religious orders offers an adequate explanation for apparent injustice of Tamburlaine's life. Rather than show how Christianity superior to Islam and polytheism, plays produce skeptical interpretations of every religious order--and thus of religious justice as a concept. Some critics have looked to historical record to explain Marlowe's seeming lack of concern with justice in Tamburlaine I and II. (2) That is, because historical Tamburlaine did not suffer military defeat, Marlowe cannot afford his character a tragic fall without stretching limits of his audience's credulity. Yet because almost no early modern playwright deemed an accurate account of real-life events essential to a history play such an argument cannot explain Marlowe's choice to represent Tamburlaine as a terrifying tyrant who escapes both divine and human justice. Furthermore, since Tamburlaine I and II were not commissioned but were conceived by Marlowe himself, one might ask why he chose to dramatize a story of such inexplicable suffering and chilling injustice. (3) I propose that Marlowe was attracted to this story precisely because it provides little, if any, affirmation of his own society's religious ideals of justice. In his formulation of religion as an anthropological phenomenon, Clifford Geertz describes cultural work of a religious order as the formulation, by means of symbols, of an image of such a genuine order of world which will account for, and even celebrate, perceived ambiguities, puzzles, and paradoxes in human experience. The effort not to deny undeniable--that there are unexplained events, that life hurts, or that rain falls upon just--but to deny that there are inexplicable events, that life unendurable, that justice a mirage. (4) By repeatedly representing situations in which religious faith has no bearing on military success or failure, Tamburlaine plays raise doubts about whether religion correct lens through which to view any historical or political event. …

Shelley's Defences of Poetry

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) was a poet who possessed, in his own words, “the power of communicating and receiving intense and impassioned conceptions respecting man and nature.” 2 Yet the greatness of his poetry, this essay will argue, does not essentially reside in his capacity to articulate his strong libertarian beliefs. These beliefs may be the ground of his conscious intellectual being. They show the influence of many thinkers, including that enshrined in the Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), written by his father-in-law, William Godwin. But the supposition that Shelley uses poetry as the vehicle for the endorsement of a system of ideas is fundamentally erroneous, as he himself argues in two important places for understanding his poetics: the Preface to Prometheus Unbound, where he asserts that “Didactic poetry is my abhorrence” (232) and A Defence of Poetry, where he develops a sophisticated theory of poetry’s primary appeal to the imagination and argues that “A Poet ... would do ill to embody his own conceptions of right and wrong, which are usually those of his place and time, in his poetical creations, which participate in neither” (682).

Contemporary Poetry and Social Life

Contemporary Poetry and Social Life Siobhan Phillips (bio) Oren Izenberg, Being Numerous: Poetry and the Ground of Social Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011. ix + 234 pp. $27.95. In Being Numerous: Poetry and the Ground of Social Life,Oren Izenberg sets out nothing less than a definition and defense of poetry. The complete book shows why essay-length portions have roused such excitement among scholars of the “new lyric studies” and of twentieth-century literature; this urgent, considered study is essential to both. Izenberg is interested in the nature of a genre pressed to its essence by the necessities of recent history. He would shift attention away from the fact of the twentieth-century poem—whether taken as a specific instance of situated speech or as an ideal expression of transcendent self-reflection—and toward the operation of twentieth-century poetry. Poetry can be a potential, he argues, rather than a product or effect; it is something we are rather than something we do. It allows one to recognize the presence of others and thus provides one with the foundation for social feeling. Writers of this art are not seeking “a kind of object” so much as “a knowledge or capacity” that is “constitutive of what it is to be a person,” and they do not hope to create a work of art so much as to “reveal, exemplify, or make manifest” that establishing “power” (17). Poetry’s unique function, then, is a humanism more basic than any justification, embellishment, or even expression of human life. Poetry proves that life in the first place. In a useful passage of his introduction to Being Numerous, Izenberg compares poetry [End Page 188] to the “indication sign” of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, something that “motivates our confidence in the existence of an intending mind” without communicating, necessarily, any particular intention or aspect of the mentality (30). To further define the nature of indication would be to draw limits, forbidding some group or aspect human recognition, and it is just such exclusions that Izenberg’s poetic capacity would subvert. Poetry, he explains, allows “an account of personhood” that is “minimal,” “universal,” and “real,” and therefore one that is open and evident to all—manifesting alterity without specifying what it could or should be (4). “[T]he persons intended by the poetic principle are defined by their possession of value,” Izenberg writes, and that value inheres before any taxonomic detail (23). This description means, paradoxically and interrelatedly, that poets can serve poetry by refusing to make poems, and that poetry can serve politics by refusing to engage politically. Since any accomplishment in verse threatens to circumscribe its essential universality, the writers Izenberg hails in Being Numerous take suspicion of their craft to be in service of its aim. Silence may be the most poetic act of all. Conscientious reticence, furthermore, bears real consequence: as Izenberg explains, “[t]he attempt to make the person appear anew as a value-bearing fact—as the necessary ground of social life—is a conceptual precursor to any effective politics, to any subsequent account of justice” (35). The effects and accounts that follow from this “precursor” may take wildly different forms, from fascism to socialism to an anti-statist collectivity, even as poetry remains politically and judicially “radical” in the etymological sense of the term. Poetry displays a personhood that requires other persons’ recognition. This type of poetic legislation is deeply Shelleyan, as Izenberg points out. Like Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Defense of Poetry,” Being Numerous forwards a justification of aesthetic activity that supersedes aesthetics as a goal. But its worth is most germane, Izenberg argues, to a twentieth-century world in which “a set of civilizational crises” have made the threat to personhood omnipresent and imperative (2). These crises include theoretical turmoil, which Izenberg describes as a post-Enlightenment “terror [End Page 189] of skepticism about persons” (33) in a “philosophical culture that emphasizes the contingency of human value” (34), and historical devastation—a combination of “decolonization and nation formation, the levelings of consumer culture, ‘the end of history,’ and above all, genocide and the specter of total annihilation” (2). As person-valuing poetry redresses these conditions...

Timothy Rosendale, Liturgy and Literature in the Making of Protestant EnglandLiturgy and Literature in the Making of Protestant England. Timothy Rosendale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. x+237.

<i>Timothy Rosendale</i>, Liturgy and Literature in the Making of Protestant England<i>Liturgy and Literature in the Making of Protestant England</i>. Timothy Rosendale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. x+237.

MATTHEW DIMMOCK and ANDREW HADFIELD (eds), Literature and Popular Culture in Early Modern England.

THE presence of Peter Burke’s influential Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (1978; rev. 1994) can be felt throughout this ostensibly more narrowly focused collection. Burke writes an approving afterword, and many of the contributors examine his notion that popular culture was everybody’s culture until a discernable rift gradually grows between the longstanding elite culture of the learned and more popular forms of expression. In the literature of Early Modern England Sir Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesie (c.1580), with its dismissals of the ‘base men with servile wits’ who wrote for the press and the ‘mongrell Tragy-comedie’ of the theatre, is an apparent landmark in this emerging division between elite and popular.1 And yet, matters were not so simple. Sidney’s own works were soon to be popularized, both in print and on stage; his great protégé, Edmund Spenser, had a predilection for jest books (6–7). The terms ‘popular’ and ‘elite’ are shown to be as problematic in the period as they remain in our own time; but, as Burke notes, ‘we cannot easily speak about the interaction of elite culture and popular culture without first making the distinction’ (210). While no new, or refined, theoretical model is proposed, this volume does present a diverse and stimulating range of essays, which taken together illustrate the complex nature of assimilations and negotiations between popular and elite cultural forms.

IN DEFENCE OF POETRY: Defending Poetry: Art and Ethics in Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, and Geoffrey Hill. By DAVID-ANTOINE WILLIAMS

Introducing the relationship between poetry and ethics, David-Antoine Williams invokes the obvious sources. Against poetry, he cites Plato's banishment of poets from the Republic, Auden's ‘Poetry makes nothing happen’, and Adorno's ‘To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’; for poetry, Sidney, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Arnold, and, with a nod to more recent theory, Levinas. An impressive array, but a more analytical approach would have been helpful. For example, one might distinguish between becoming morally aware (a plausible effect of reading poetry) and becoming morally active (a more doubtful outcome); or see how aesthetic judgements might imply or entail moral ones; or look at how lyric, as opposed to other poetry, might function ethically, perhaps drawing upon the importance of empathy and the relation between reader and persona. Williams is concerned with ‘attempts at the ethical defence of poetic art by three of the most important poet-critics of the past fifty years’. He begins with Eliot's formulation of the dual demands upon a poet: to preserve and improve language, and to attend to the spiritual and social life of the present and the past. (Though he records the uncertainties felt by Eliot in 1942 under the pressure of war: ‘In the midst of what is going on now, it is hard, when you sit down at a desk, to feel confident that morning after morning spent fiddling with words and rhythms is justified activity … And on the other hand, external or public activity is more of a drug than is this solitary toil which often seems so pointless’.) These twin duties, to language and to society, frame the discussion of Brodsky, Heaney, and Hill.

Electronic Literature as a Sword of Lightning

This essay analyzes the humanistic potential of digital poetry in the age of new media. By way of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Defence of Poetry,” theories of the posthuman, and the tradition of Marxist critique, this essay aims to identify an occasion for hope within the new media arts. Reading electronic literature through Shelley’s metaphor of poetry as a “sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it,” Heckman analyzes the ethical dimensions of literature against the backdrop of technocapitalism and instrumental theories of the human. The essay concludes with a discussion of intersubjectivity, politics, and love.

How Poetry Moves Readers: Sidney, Spenser, and Milton

This paper begins from the new emphasis in Sidney's Defence of Poetry on poetry's capacity to move – not simply to teach and delight, the usual formula. Challenging Plato, Gosson, and many others, he argued poetry's superiority to history and philosophy by claiming that it holds forth models of virtue and vice that cannot fail to move readers, respectively, to emulation or abhorrence. Moving the audience is an effect more commonly associated with rhetoric, and Sidney also makes an explicit connection between moving to personal and to political virtue. I argue that Spenser, and later Milton follow Sidney in claiming poetry's power to move in both spheres, but that all these poets develop a much more complex poetics of moving in their literary works: the Old Arcadia, the Faerie Queene, and Paradise Lost. Within all these works, poetic speakers are shown moving audiences but find they cannot control the audiences' reactions. Sidney, Spenser, and Milton themselves seek to move readers through these works, but now by specifically literary means, inviting readers to experience the passions, complexities, and conflicts that always attend moral and political choices.

Valeurs, défense, crise et avenir des sciences humaines

The humanities, particularly literature and the arts, seem always to have to justify their value and legitimacy vis-a-vis some other, more practical, more useful, or more authoritative aspects of human life and activities. In ancient Greece, Plato dismissed poetry as being untrue and irrational, but beginning with Aristotle, there has been a long tradition of defense of poetry in the West. Traditionally the most effective defense was to emphasize the moral values the humanities can teach and the exemplary significance of the classics. In the late nineteenth century, science began to challenge the value of the humanities, and in the twentieth century, that resulted in the “two cultures” debate in the 1960s. In more recent time, however, a real crisis of the humanities arises not from challenges from the outside but from within, as scholars in the humanities—particularly in literary and cultural studies—question the basic values of the humanities and “decanonize” the classics. The utilitarian tendency of modern society makes it difficult for the humanities to prove their practical use and worth. To argue for the value of the humanities, therefore, it is very important to refuse the utilitarian terms of debate, to reclaim the values of the humanities, and to re-emphasize the exemplary significance of the classic in order to work toward a better future not only of the humanities, but of our world at large.

“Wonderfully Ravished”: Platonic Erotics and the Heroic Genre in Sir Philip Sidney's Defence of Poesy

“Wonderfully Ravished”: Platonic Erotics and the Heroic Genre in Sir Philip Sidney's <i>Defence of Poesy</i>

Painting the Police Station Blue: The Almost Impossible Argument for Poetry in the Elite Educational Research Journals

In this article, the author takes up the gauntlet regarding what seems like an almost impossible argument: the publication of poetry for its own sake in the elite educational research journals. The author concentrates specifically on a defence of poetry because poetry is. Poetry is and has been since humankind began to talk, but the uses of poetry, and especially exposure to it ‘in the raw’, are generally rather restricted in modernity, publication in the education literatures being no exception. In so doing, the author also attempts to illustrate a range of ways that the publication of poetry – and thus wider engagement with it – might help us to come to understand relationally the significance of the arts to education when considered from an ethic of art for art's sake.