In Plato's Republic, Socrates refers to an "ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry" and notoriously exiles poetry from the ideal state. Though he admits to feeling the charms of the "honeyed muse," Plato's Socrates sees the inspired wisdom of the poets as fundamentally incompatible with the rational truths of philosophers, and he therefore regards poetry as an unacceptable danger to social order and well-being. From its beginnings, therefore, western philosophy defined itself in opposition to poetry and the kind of wisdom or knowledge it was understood to express. In this course, we will consider the modern legacy of this ancient quarrel, reading philosophers reading poets and poets reading philosophers, as well as poets writing philosophically (not to mention philosophers, like Heidegger, writing poetically). Few thinkers since Plato's day (not even his own student Aristotle) fully accepted the uncompromising argument about poetry in The Republic, yet we will see that as with so many other matters, Plato's ideas have nonetheless cast a long shadow over even the most conciliatory of later writings about the relationship of poetry to philosophical thought. What is the difference between philosophical and poetic knowledge (if poetry can even be said to provide a kind of knowledge)? In what ways are poems vehicles of thought? How do they express the mind at work? Do poems provide access to cognitive experiences inaccessible by other means? Is poetry, as Plato argued, at war with rationality? How does philosophy alter (and must it?) when it attempts to bring the poets back in from the conceptual cold? Philosophers we will read include: Plato, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Benjamin, Adorno Derrida, Kristeva, Koethe and Nussbaum. And poets: Homer, Coleridge, Holderlin, Baudelaire, Stevens, Celan, Grossman, Bernstein, and Stewart. Format: discussion/seminar. Requirements: active participation in class discussions, one 5- to 8-page paper and one 8- to 10-page paper. Prerequisites: a 100-level English course, except 150. Enrollment limit: 25 (expected: 20). Preference given to English majors. (Criticism)

Hour: RHIE