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Poetry and Directions for Thought
- Philosophy and Literature
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 37, Number 2, October 2013
- pp. 451-471
- 10.1353/phl.2013.0029
- Article
- Additional Information
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Do poems provide “scripts” for reader’s thoughts? Kendall Walton’s account of poets as thoughtwriters, in which poems can serve to express readers’ thoughts without positing an expressive thinker in the poem, is considered from various angles. While it seems a minimal expressive thinker needs to be posited, this leaves open other questions about poems as the stuff of thought. Can poems be fully thought, and do readers take ownership of the thinking that poetry prompts? Elizabeth Bishop’s “At the Fishhouses” is discussed as a poem that allows the reader a chance to separate aspects of content and control of thought.