Philosophical poetry in a time of crisis: reading post-war American poetry in relation to twentieth- century continental philosophy

Abstract

After the Second World War, continental philosophy became increasingly influential on the American literary left. In particular, the philosophy of Martin Heidegger had a profound effect on the Objectivist poet, George Oppen, in the 1950s and 1960s, and less than a decade later Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy was crucial to the Language poet, Ron Silliman. Each poet turned to philosophy in response to the crises of post-war America. As a consequence, Heidegger’s and Wittgenstein’s philosophies have since become dominant frameworks for reading Oppen’s and Silliman’s poetry, and for reading twentieth-century poetry more generally.

Such readings, however, risk reducing a poet’s work to the passive reflection of contextual materials. In contrast, this thesis proposes a combination of ‘faithful’ and ‘unfaithful’ reading, interpreting a poet’s work from both within and without the parameters set by its context. Faithful reading responds to and unfaithful reading questions the hold that context currently wields over interpretation. This thesis argues that, while philosophical influence is important to any understanding of Oppen’s and Silliman’s poetry, faithful reading alone often neglects the ways in which poetry is meaningful in relation to competing philosophies.

Furthermore, the thesis argues that, despite the great differences between Heidegger and Wittgenstein, both Oppen and Silliman use philosophy to create poetry that responds directly to a time of historical and cultural crisis. Heidegger’s philosophy helps Oppen to seek a phenomenological experience that is like Heidegger’s concept of Ereignis, the event of Being’s disclosure. For Oppen, this experience is capable of resisting the ideologies behind his capitalist culture and American war-time atrocity. At the same time, however, the experience resists the language that is used to express it. Wittgenstein’s philosophy also helped Silliman respond to the historical crisis of war-time atrocity and capitalism’s dominance over his culture. Wittgenstein demonstrates that language’s meanings are social and determined within ‘forms of life’. This allows Silliman to emphasise, politicize, and trouble at the intersection of language’s meanings the forms of life from which they emerge. This contention with what Wittgenstein calls the ‘grammatical criteria’ of meaning also works to disclose the crisis to which the poems respond.