Thinking Poetry

<p>This collection brings together some of the most prominent critics of contemporary poetry and some of the most significant poets working in the English language today to offer a critical assessment of the nature and function of poetic thought. Working at once with questions of form literary theory and philosophy this volume gives an extraordinarily diverse original and mobile account of the kind of 'thinking' that poetry can do. The conviction that moves through the collection as a whole is that poetry is not an addition to thought nor a vehicle to express a given idea nor an ornamental language in which thinking might find itself couched. Rather all the essays suggest that poetry <em>itself</em> thinks in ways that other forms of expression cannot thus making new intellectual political and cultural formulations possible. </p><p>This book was originally published as a special issue of <i>Textual Practice.</i></p>