This dissertation asks how the physiological conception of the mind promoted by scientific, philosophical and cultural forces since the mid-twentieth century has affected poetic accounts of mental experience. For the cohort of poets I identify here—James Merrill, Robert Creeley, A.R. Ammons, John Ashbery, and Jorie Graham—recognition that fallible, biological mechanisms determine the very structure of human subjectivity causes deep anxiety about how we perceive the world, exercise reason, and produce knowledge. These poets feel caught between the brain sciences’ empirical vision of the mind, which holds the appeal of a fresh and credible vocabulary but often appears reductive, and the literary tradition’s overwhelmingly transcendental vision of the mind, which bears intuitive resonance but also appears increasingly naïve. These poets find aesthetic opportunity in confronting the nature of mind: Merrill takes up forgetting as a central subject, making elegant, entropic monuments out of the distortions and perforations of embodied memory; Ammons and Creeley become captivated by the motion of thinking, and use innovative, dynamic forms to emphasize the temporal and spatial impositions of embodiment upon the motions of thought; Ashbery luxuriates in the representational possibilities of distraction as a structural and thematic principle; Graham identifies the anatomical limits of the visual system with our limits of empathetic perspective, conceiving of her poems as prostheses that can enhance our feeble power to imagine other minds. In a host of significatory practices that reimagine lyric subjectivity in physiological terms, these poets’ ambitious and influential oeuvres reveal the convergence of “raw” and “cooked” post-war poetries in a set of fundamental suppositions about our aptitudes as observers, knowers, and interpreters; this convergence exposes the vestiges of the Romantic mind in modernism’s empowered conception of the poetic imagination. Uniquely equipped to explore meaningful correspondences between physiological and literary form, the contemporary lyric defies the novel’s preeminent position in the study of literary consciousness by demonstrating an enterprising talent for philosophical investigation of the experience of mind.

The dissertation includes a critical essay on Jorie Graham's "The Guardian Angel of the Little Utopia and a full-length collection of poetry entitled Moonlight in Quota. The essay is a critical examination which argues that Graham's poems question Western anthropocentric thought through her constant arrangement of particular images (flowers, yellow sky, leaves) and her subsequent questioning of such intellectual and linguistic arrangements. Graham grapples with ideas of perception, questions the historical concepts of truth and knowledge, and engages in linguistic play both musically and imagistically. Each section is tied together by some overriding theme or persistent image: 1.) forgetting, Mexican-American border scenes 2.) poverty and faith shown through images of marginalized characters 3.) Artistic creation as a means for the survival for the "other."

This study performs a reading of Wittgenstein’s thought that integrates his sometimes sidelined remarks on aesthetics and belief, and emphasises consideration of language use on the level of practice. It analyses the many ways that Wittgenstein engages with the inexpressible or the limits of expression through comparison with poetry as a practice. The potential of a Wittgensteinian method of literary analysis concentrating on grammatical structures, exemplary forms of expression and quotidian meaning-making is shown by viewing several poets’ work in connection with specific forms of the inexpressible. This thesis consists of three parts. The first chapter surveys previous applications of Wittgenstein to aesthetic appreciation and analysis, and considers common interpretations of his earlier and later work. Incorporating a wide range of Wittgenstein sources allows a new reading to emerge that gives appropriate weight to his hitherto under-researched writings. This reading is tested in Chapters 2-5, in each case studying a poet or poets alongside a philosophical text or topic. Chapter 2 uses the negative theology of Pseudo-Dionysius to probe the ineffable; through Cora Diamond’s resolute reading of the Tractatus, Kei Miller’s ‘Church Women’ series and John Burnside’s intimate ineffable of ‘Parousia’, a grammatical understanding of inexpressibility emerges. Chapter 3 compares John McDowell’s minimal realism in Mind and World with Wallace Steven’s Supreme Fiction, demonstrating how Stevens’ – and Wittgenstein’s – rich conception of experience can close off a number of philosophical lacunae. Chapter 4 concentrates on the poetry of Jorie Graham, whose conception of the self is saturated with language. Parallels with Wittgenstein’s methodology are drawn, and some reminders issued to curb the excesses of postmodern accounts of subjectivity. The focus in Chapter 5 moves to the use of cartographical metaphor in Philosophical Investigations and Kei Miller’s poetry. The constraints of specific discourses on our thinking are examined, together with poetry’s potential for laying bare or reinvigorating the pictures by which we navigate. Finally, Chapter 6 discusses a selection of poetic projects completed alongside my research, to extend the reading of Wittgenstein into the area of creative practice. This thesis demonstrates Wittgenstein’s prolonged engagement with the limits of expression and with poetry, as well as the profit of a Wittgensteinian approach to poetry. It thereby questions a number of current responses to Wittgenstein’s work, and displays its own original creative outcomes.

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According to philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas, alterity can exist only in its infinite and fluid nature in which the aspects of it that exceed the human ability to fully understand it remain unthematized in language. Levinas sees the encounter between self and other as the moment that instigates ethical responsibility, a moment so vital to avoiding mastering what is external to oneself that it should replace Western philosophy’s traditional emphasis on being as philosophy’s basis, or “First Philosophy.” Levinas’s conceptualization of language as a fluid, non-mastering saying, which one must continually re-enliven against a congealing and mastering said, is at the heart of his ethical project of relating to the other of alterity with ethical responsibility, or proximity. The imaginative poetic language that some contemporary poetry enacts, resonates with Levinas’s ethical motivations and methods for responding to alterity. The following project investigates facets of this question in relation to Levinas: how do the contemporary poets Peter Blue Cloud, Jorie Graham, Joy Harjo, and Robert Hass use poetic language uniquely to engage with alterity in an ethical way, thus allowing it to retain its mystery and infinite nature? I argue that by keeping language alive in a way similar to a Levinasian saying, which avoids mastering otherness by attending to its uniqueness and imaginatively engaging with it, they enact an ethical response to alterity. As a way of unpacking these ideas, this inquiry will investigate the compelling, if unsettled, convergence in the work of Levinas and that of Blue Cloud, Graham, Harjo, and Hass by unfolding a number of Levinasian-informed close readings of major poems by these writers as foregrounding various forms of Levinasian saying. / Ph. D. / This project grounds itself on questions of what makes something that is outside of oneself unique, and of how to use language to let that entity, or being, retain its uniqueness alongside the human quest to understand the world that is always in danger of overtaking the not-I. Philosopher Emmanuel Levinas thought these questions were the critical ones for reframing basic issues of humanity. His work asserts that in order to become conscious selves and to relate to other people without dominating them, it is necessary to open up to the force of the encounter with those who are different from you, and whom you cannot fully conceive, allowing them to remain partially inconceivable. The site for relating in this ethically responsible way exists in language that constantly acknowledges that it cannot capture the object of its descriptions, as opposed to language that attempts to appropriate the other through its usual operations. A unique intersection between these ideas regarding ethics occurs when one considers contemporary poetry, which engages with similar considerations. Therefore, by reading four contemporary poets with vastly different cultural backgrounds: Peter Blue Cloud, Jorie Graham, Joy Harjo, and Robert Hass in a way that considers how they use language to relate ethically to the world beyond their material and intellectual grasp, it is possible to see how Levinas’s ideas might operate in actual language sensitive to these issues.

This thesis considers a range of contemporary poets' responses to science, emphasising the diversity of these engagements and exploring how poetry can disrupt or re-negotiate the barriers between the two activities. My first chapter explores the idea of ‘authority' in both science and poetry and considers how these authorities co-exist in the work of two poet-scientists, Miroslav Holub and David Morley. My second chapter considers the role of metaphor in science and the effect of transferring scientific terms into poetry, specifically with reference to the poetry of Michael Symmons Roberts who engages with the metaphors related to the human genome. In my third chapter I focus on collections by Ruth Padel and Emily Ballou that tell the life of Charles Darwin in verse. I discuss how these collections function as forms of scientific biography and show that poetic engagement with Darwin's thought processes reveals some of the similarities between scientific and poetic thinking. An area of science such as quantum mechanics may seem too complex for a non-scientist to respond to in poetry, but in my fourth chapter I show how Jorie Graham uses ideas from twentieth-century physics to re-think the materialism of the world and our perception of it. My final chapter is concerned with the relationship between ecopoetry and ecological science, with regard to the work of John Burnside. I show that although he is informed about scientific matters, in his poetry he suggests that science isn't the only way of understanding the world. Rather than framing science and poetry in terms of the ‘two cultures', this thesis moves away from antagonism towards productive interaction and dialogue. Whilst science and poetry are clearly very different activities, the many points of overlap and connection between them suggest that poetry is a resonant and unique way of exploring scientific ideas.