• Carefully considering the difference in the philosophical potential of page poetry and performance poetry, Karen Simecek argues that it is only by considering them side by side that the unique cognitive value of each can be realised. Focusing on spoken word poetry reveals the importance of voice and embodied words to the differing epistemic rewards of engaging with contemporary works of poetry in both private reading and live performance. This concept of embodied voice progresses a new line of t…Read more
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    There is a long-standing debate about whether poetry can make a substantive contribution to philosophy with compelling arguments to show that poetry and philosophy involve distinct modes of thought and aims, albeit with similar concerns. This paper argues that reading lyric poetry can play a substantive role in philosophy by helping the philosopher understand how to forge connections with the perspectives of others. The paper takes the view that poetry is not directly philosophical but can play …Read more
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    On the Seeming Incompatibility Between Poetry and Philosophy
    Estetika: The European Journal of Aesthetics 50 (1): 27. 2013.
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    Linking perspectives: A role for poetry in philosophical inquiry
    Metaphilosophy 53 (2-3): 305-318. 2022.
    There is a long-standing debate about whether poetry can make a substantive contribution to philosophy with compelling arguments to show that poetry and philosophy involve distinct modes of thought and aims, albeit with similar concerns. This paper argues that reading lyric poetry can play a substantive role in philosophy by helping the philosopher understand how to forge connections with the perspectives of others. The paper takes the view that poetry is not directly philosophical but can play …Read more
  •  317
    Literary Interventions in Justice: A Symposium
    Estetika: The European Journal of Aesthetics 58 (2): 160-78. 2021.
    The purpose of this symposium is to explore the ways in which literature, broadly construed to include poetry and narrative in a variety of modes of representation, can change the world by providing interventions in justice. Our approach foregrounds the relationship between the activity demanded by some individual literary works and some categories of literary work on the one hand and the way in which those works can make a tangible difference to social reality on the other. We consider three ty…Read more
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    The Poem as Icon: A Study in Aesthetic Cognition (review)
    British Journal of Aesthetics 62 (1): 146-149. 2022.
    The Poem as Icon: A Study in Aesthetic Cognition FREEMANMARGARET H.oup. 2020. pp. 216. £64.00.
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    Performance is increasingly important to the poet, which is evidenced by the growing numbers of videos and audio recordings online including YouTube, the National Poetry library, and Poetry Archive. As a result, there are greater opportunities to engage with poets reading their own work and consequently, there is a need to move away from thinking of poetry as primary something that takes shape on the page. Furthermore, by refocusing attention to poetry as an oral artform, in particular to poetry…Read more
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    Reading for Self-Knowledge: Poetry, Perspective, and Narrative Justice
    Journal of Aesthetic Education 54 (4): 36-47. 2020.
    In his monograph Narrative Justice, Rafe McGregor offers an argument for the role narrative can play as part of an aesthetic education of justice—a form of moral development that, he argues, has the potential to reduce criminal inhumanity including terrorism and radical extremism by revealing the problematic master narratives that promote epistemological vices in individuals. Although he makes an important argument about the nature and value of narrative, I argue that a look to poetry will help …Read more
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    Cultivating Intimacy: The Use of the Second Person in Lyric Poetry
    Philosophy and Literature 43 (2): 501-518. 2019.
    Lyric poetry is often associated with expression of the personal. For instance, the work of the so-called “confessional” poets, such as Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, is often thought to reveal inmost thoughts and feelings of the poetic voice through first personal expression. The lyric poem, with its use of personal pronouns and singularity of voice, appears to invite the reader to experience the unfolding of the words as the intimate expression of another.Intimacy itself is associated with atte…Read more
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    New directions for the philosophy of poetry
    Philosophy Compass 14 (6). 2019.
    This article will introduce readers to current debates in the philosophy of poetry. This includes discussion of the need for a philosophy of poetry as distinct from a philosophy of literature, the (in)compatibility of poetry and philosophy, poetic meaning and interpretation, and poetry in relation to affect, emotion and expressiveness, which opens up discussion of wider forms of poetry from spoken word to signlanguage poetry. The article ends with suggestions for future directions of research in…Read more
  •  58
    On the Seeming Incompatibility Between Poetry and Philosophy
    Estetika: The European Journal of Aesthetics 50 (1): 27-40. 2013.
    Poetry as a mode of philosophizing can reasonably be considered a failure when making the following moves: from the experientially particular to general content (by means of abstract thought); from ordinary pre-reflective thinking (a contingent thought someone happened to have) to philosophically rigorous thought (which is rationally grounded); from domestic conceptions (connections of thought made by individual readers) to public conceptions (why these connections are relevant to our general, c…Read more
  •  24
    Hearing Meaning and Poetry: An Interview with Angela Leighton
    Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics 9 (3): 3-14. 2012.
    An interview with poet and literary critic, Professor Angela Leighton (Senior Research Fellow, Trinity College, Cambridge). She is primarily interested in poetry of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but also in nineteenth-century aestheticism and its continuing legacy in the twentieth, in particular the work of Woolf, Yeats, Stevens, Bishop, Plath and W.S. Graham. In this interview, Leighton talks about her poetry, the philosophical potential of poetry and the way in which poetry means.
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    The Philosophy of Poetry (review)
    British Journal of Aesthetics 56 (3): 320-322. 2016.
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    Beyond Narrative: Poetry, Emotion and the Perspectival View
    British Journal of Aesthetics 55 (4): 497-513. 2015.
    The view that narrative artworks can offer insights into our lives, in particular, into the nature of the emotions, has gained increasing popularity in recent years. However, talk of narrative often involves reference to a perspective or point of view, which indicates a more fundamental mechanism at work. In this article, I argue that our understanding of the emotions is incomplete without adequate attention to the perspectival structures in which they are embedded. Drawing on Bennett Helm’s the…Read more
  •  28
    The Uses of Poetry: Renewing an Educational Understanding of a Language Art
    with Viv Ellis
    Journal of Aesthetic Education 51 (1): 98-114. 2017.
    Poetry holds an important place as part of our cultural heritage.1 However, despite poetry’s apparent cultural value, there have been surprisingly few attempts to articulate clearly how this should be reflected in the teaching curriculum in our schools and universities. As a consequence of this lack of clarity, the cultural value of poetry gives way to the increasing emphasis on providing instrumental justification for the teaching curriculum; including poetry in the curriculum is often justifie…Read more
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    To date, the most substantial accounts of our engagement with literature have focused on prose-fiction, in particular the novel, drawing on issues of plot, character and narrative in explaining our understanding of literary works. These accounts do not consider how the poetic features of a literary work may affect our reading experience and how this contributes to the meaning of the work. In this thesis I show the philosophical importance of the experience of reading poetry for the role it can p…Read more
  •  23
    What is Fiction For? (review)
    British Journal of Aesthetics 56 (4): 424-427. 2016.
    What is Fiction For?HarrisonBernardindiana university press. 2014. pp. 620. £23.99.