Abstract

Poetry has long been considered divinely or unconsciously inspired, but in some writers it also contains reasoned inquiry about the self, the natural world, or the properties of language. If such inquiry does yield insightful and reliable knowledge, we can expect poets' analyses of the world to overlap with those of another, hegemonic, form of inquiry, natural science. Because philosophers have analyzed in depth how scientists study and explain nature, I employ five major categories from twentieth-century philosophy of science as a heuristic for the close reading of and commentary on poems by Auden, Ponge, Pessoa, Valery, and Williams. Using philosophy of science to interpret specific poetic texts leads both to a more rationalist theory of poetry and to a deeper understanding of the ways in which poetry and science at once overlap and differ from each other. ;On a first level, poetry may engage in the conceptual problem-solving associated with science by Larry Laudan. Poets often set themselves methodological challenges or seek to resolve conflicting worldviews. Secondly, poetry can study natural phenomena and fellow creatures in an inductive way which has considerable overlap with scientific observation. In a third area, corroboration, poetry differs fundamentally from science. While poets do hypothesize and test those hypotheses, confirmation of poetic argument is generally located outside of the text itself. At the most general level, however, poetry again resembles science, for scientific research programmes offer an analogy for poets' responses to past and present literature, art, and thought. Finally, based on close analysis of poems by Valery and Auden, I propose that the controversial incommensurability thesis relies on too literal a model of translation. ;Therefore, not only are ways of knowing in twentieth-century poetry and science part of a larger modern episteme, but poetry and science are least similar at an intermediate theoretical level. In the concrete tasks of observation and inquiry and at the most abstract level of tradition, poetry and science show significant cognitive resemblances. Both make sense of the world and communicate that sense to others. Poetic knowing is not equivalent to scientific knowledge, but it is not an oxymoron