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An Object-Oriented Defense of Poetry
- New Literary History
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 43, Number 2, Spring 2012
- pp. 205-224
- 10.1353/nlh.2012.0018
- Article
- Additional Information
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This essay is one of the first to explore the implications of the emerging philosophy known as object-oriented ontology (OOO) for the study and creation of poetry. OOO provides a powerful conceptual toolbox for understanding how poetry works. Furthermore, poetry itself may be seen as a template for understanding how any entity—a human, a ball of string, a star cluster—can interact with any other—a toaster, an octopus, an abandoned warehouse. This is because OOO's theory of causality reserves a very unique and powerful place for the aesthetic dimension. In this essay, I read Percy Shelley's A Defence of Poetry in light of OOO.