Abstract

This chapter situates the discussion of poetry firmly in contemporary metaphysics, and it offers an excellent sense of the extent to which poetry can raise pressing and unique problems for the ontology of literary works. Unlike, say, the modern novel, poetry is both a written and a spoken art, and the chapter sets itself the task of offering an ontology of poetic woks which respects the diversity of poetic practices old and new. Poems, the chapter argues, are abstract artifacts whose existence is essentially dependent on culturally and historically situated practices. These practices are, in the broadest sense, either inscription-based or declamation-based, and this helps us to acknowledge the role of both textuality and orality in diverse poetic traditions. The upshot of this theory is that philosophers are hugely mistaken to think that one can offer a generic ontology of literary works. The various literary arts each require their own metaphysical attention.