Meaning and Exemplarity in Poetics and Literary Theory

This essay addresses the question of literary interpretation within the context of a poetics of "exemplarity" that takes as its starting point the Aristotelian conception of poetry as both historical (individual or singular) and philosophical (general or universal). The essay analyzes the reception of two highly canonical poems—John Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and W. B. Yeats's "The Second Coming"—as contrastingly engaging with the question of exemplarity, and it proposes that the undecidable relationship between the particular and the general complicates any attempt to construe a literary text as delivering a univocal or singular meaning.