Poetry and Ethics

Catalog description

If history is, as Charles Olson claims, a "form of attention" and we are all participants in a collective reality relative to our capacity for language use, what ethical issues come to bear on what the poet chooses to attend to--not only as subject matter but as form? Can poetic language be sufficiently responsive to the challenge of empathy? Is there an ethics of attention? Guided by philosophical texts, we shall investigate ethical possibilities in a range of world poetries.