“What Is Poetry?”

Lecture and Conversation

3222 Angell Hall

RSVP here: https://sessions.studentlife.umich.edu/login?r=/track/event/session/88784

What is poetry? You probably have some idea, or at least you know it when you see it. You probably also know that this is a trick question. In practice, it’s not hard to know a poem when you see one: it appears in lines or it rhymes or it’s called poetry even if it looks like prose. In theory, everyone knows you are not supposed to answer the question. This talk will address the relation between determinate practice and indeterminate theory in modern (post-eighteenth-century) Anglo-American poetics.