Poetry and the Fate of the Senses-轻识

Stewart, a poet, professor, and MacArthur Fellow, ambitiously traces "the path of the aesthetic in search of an explanation for the role of poetry in our culture." In a book much like Burke's On the Sublime or Kant's Observations on the Sublime, Stewart tacks from darkness and grief to sound, poetic voice, lyric possession, the deictic now (measure and time), and the nocturne. She contends that poetry "makes tangible, visible, and audible the contours of our shared humanity," that it "sustains and transforms the threshold between individual and social existence." Drawing from many examples of poetry, from the ancient Greeks to the postmoderns, she explores the interplay between somatic apprehensions (sound, listening, touch, vertigo) and formal orders. Both physically and poetically big, this book is recommended for those studying the metaphysics of poetry. Scott Hightower, Fordham Univ., New York

Susan Stewart is the Avalon Foundation University Professor in the Humanities and director of the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts at Princeton University. A former MacArthur fellow, she is the author of five earlier critical studies, including Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (2002), winner of the Christian Gauss award of the Phi Beta Kappa Society and the Truman Capote Award. She is also the author of five books of poems, most recently Red Rover (2008) and Columbarium (2003), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. These titles, along with The Open Studio (2005) and The Forest (1995), are all published by the University of Chicago Press.