AustLit

'‘Not So Much a Thought’ explores the real or professed dichotomies between thought and feeling, mind and body, the personal and the universal to consider the general relationship between philosophy and poetry. Beginning with Brook Emery’s own poetry and broadening to consider the views of Romantic and modern poets (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Wallace Stevens, Robert Gray), literary critics (Samuel Johnson, Marjorie Perloff, Hank Lazer) and philosophers (Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty) it argues that philosophy and poetry are not antagonistic, as has often been assumed, but that they are different ways of thinking and saying. It concludes that a poem is inevitably a form of reasoning even if it does not employ, in Heidegger’s phrase, ‘the logic of calculating reason’. ' (Publication abstract)