Addressing objective and subjective views of the self and the world in philosophy and poetry, this collection brings together a chronology of John Koethe's thoughts on the connections between the two forms and makes a significant contribution to unsettling the oppositions that separate them. The essays traverse the philosophical conception of the self in modern poetry and locate connections between poets including William Wordsworth, Wallace Stevens, and John Ashbery alongside philosophers including Kant, Schopenhauer, and Wittgenstein. Koethe pays special attention to romantic poetry and notions of the sublime, which he maps onto subjective individual experience and the objective perspective on the natural world. Koethe further explores this theme in a new essay on romanticism and the sublime in relation to the mind-body problem. Using an associative and impressionistic style to write philosophically about poetry, Koethe defends his own approach that such writing cannot and should not aim for the rigor of philosophical argumentation.

Most people, including philosophers, tend to classify human motives as falling into one of two categories: the egoistic or the altruistic, the self-interested or the moral. According to Susan Wolf, however, much of what motivates us does not comfortably fit into this scheme. Often we act neither for our own sake nor out of duty or an impersonal concern for the world. Rather, we act out of love for objects that we rightly perceive as worthy of love--and it is these actions that give meaning to our lives. Wolf makes a compelling case that, along with happiness and morality, this kind of meaningfulness constitutes a distinctive dimension of a good life. Written in a lively and engaging style, and full of provocative examples, "Meaning in Life and Why It Matters" is a profound and original reflection on a subject of permanent human concern.

"[Koethe's] new collection is that rarity, a book of poems with a genuine philosophical dimension and an elegant but conversational poise."--The New York Times Book Review "Solemn and playful, John Koethe's poems lock themselves gradually but firmly into one's memory. His new collection offers in his own words, 'happiness, for myself and strangers.'"--John Ashbery Originally published in 1984. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

" Koethe's] new collection is that rarity, a book of poems with a genuine philosophical dimension and an elegant but conversational poise."--"The New York Times Book Review"

"Solemn and playful, John Koethe's poems lock themselves gradually but firmly into one's memory. His new collection offers in his own words, 'happiness, for myself and strangers.'"--John Ashbery

Originally published in 1984.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Addressing objective and subjective views of the self and the world in philosophy and poetry, this collection brings together a chronology of John Koethe’s thoughts on the connections between the two forms and makes a significant contribution to unsettling the oppositions that separate them. The essays traverse the philosophical conception of the self in modern poetry and locate connections between poets including William Wordsworth, Wallace Stevens, and John Ashbery alongside philosophers including Kant, Schopenhauer, and Wittgenstein. Koethe pays special attention to romantic poetry and notions of the sublime, which he maps onto subjective individual experience and the objective perspective on the natural world. Koethe further explores this theme in a new essay on romanticism and the sublime in relation to the mind-body problem. Using an associative and impressionistic style to write philosophically about poetry, Koethe defends his own approach that such writing cannot and should not aim for the rigor of philosophical argumentation.

"The problem of philosophical scepticism is not so much what to say about the view itself (there being a consensus that it should be rejected), but rather what to say about the arguments that purport to yield it. And since these arguments involve claims and principles concerning notions like knowledge and possibility, it is difficult to see how to explore the arguments without exploring these notions too." from the IntroductionHow do we address philosophical arguments whose conclusions contradict our commonsense knowledge? For example: a logically impeccable argument that concludes that you cannot know that you are at this very moment reading a description of a book of philosophy. That is the problem of philosophical scepticism. Scepticism, Knowledge, and Forms of Reasoning is an attempt to resolve how best to respond to such vexing arguments, a matter on which there is no consensus among contemporary philosophers. Rather than denying the premises of such arguments or simply declaring them invalid, John Koethe delves into what such arguments reveal about the nature of reasoning itself. He suggests that there is nothing straightforwardly wrong with sceptical arguments, and that in recognizing this while at the same time honoring our commonsense convictions about knowledge, we confront profound questions about the very nature of reasoning."

Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophical work is informed throughout by a particular broad theme: that the semantic and mentalistic attributes of language and human life are shown by verbal and nonverbal conduct, but that they resist incorporation into the domain of the straightforwardly factual. So argues John Koethe, in contrast to the standard view that Wittgenstein's earlier and later philosophical positions are sharply opposed.According to the received view, Wittgenstein's thinking underwent a radical transformation after the Tractatus, leading him to abandon classical realism and to develop an alternative semantics based on the notion of warranted assertability. Koethe maintains that the thesis that semantic claims are not made true by any facts whatsoever, which was a central part of Wittgenstein's early theory of elementary propositions, was one he continued to develop in his later writings, and that it is perfectly compatible with classical realism. In making his case for the essential continuity of Wittgenstein's thought, Koethe ranges over the entire corpus of the philosopher's writing, and concludes by pointing out connections between Wittgenstein's views and those of several contemporary philosophers, including Nagel, Dennett, Davidson, and Dummett.

Collected poems from America's searching and thoughtful philosopher-poet . . . There's something Comforting about rituals renewed, even adolescents' pipe dreams: They'll find out soon enough, and meanwhile find their places In the eternal scenery, less auguries or cautionary tales Than parts of an unchanging whole, as ripe for contemplation As a planisphere or the clouds: the vexed destinies, the shared life, The sempiternal spectacle of someone preaching to the choir While walking backwards in the moment on a warm spring afternoon. John Koethe's poems--always dynamic and in process, never static or complete--luxuriate in the questions that punctuate the most humdrum of routines, rendering a robust portrait of an individual: complicated, quotidian, and resounding with truth. Gathering for the first time his impressive and award-winning body of work, published between 1966 and 2016, Walking Backwards introduces this gifted poet to a new, wider readership.

"[A] visionary new book of poems and prose meditations."--Susan Stewart, author of Columbarium and Red Rover"John Koethe's poems...are profound meditations on time and the curious hold it has on the human psyche. In them, even the most extreme exertions of consciousness are transformed into the faultless measures of clear and beautiful speech."--American Academy of Arts and LettersROTC Kills is a lyrical and arresting new collection from renowned poet John Koethe, 2011 winner of the Arts and Letters Award and the Lenore Marshall Prize for the year's outstanding work of poetry. As typified by the provocative title piece--a wistful look back at the poet's years at Harvard University in the late sixties--the poetry and prose within evoke the memories and dreams; the literature, popular culture, and philosophy of a generation through the lens of the poet's personal history. In the grand tradition of Wordsworth, Wallace Stevens, and John Ashbery, ROTC Kills is an important work from a major American poet.

In his eighth book of poems, John Koethe offers readers the reflections of a poet in midlife, an "aging child of sixty-two," passionately engaged with the world yet drawn to meditate on memory, time, and the mysteries of human existence. In "Ninety-fifth Street," Koethe retraces narratives from his life and moves across various landscapes he once inhabited; in his hands these stories and places become poems of beauty, feeling, and poignant candor.

Disarmingly conversational and always accessible, these new poems offer the pleasures of a lucid intelligence and a distinctive poetic voice, by turns contemplative and worldly, lyrical, witty, and elegiac.

Let me stay there for a while, while evening

Gathers in the sky and daylight lingers on the hills.

There's something in the air, something I can't quite see,

Hiding behind this stock of images, this language

Culled from all the poems I've ever loved.

John Koethe's remarkable gift to readers is an elegiac poetry that explores the transitory nature of ordinary human experience. The beautiful poems in this new collection celebrate the creative power of human beings, the only weapon we possess against time's relentless "slow approach to anonymity and death."

Of all Koethe's books, SALLY'S HAIR is probably his most human and various. He is well known for his meditative lyrics and this volume begins with a brilliant series of such poems, among them "Eros and the Everyday." This is followed by "The Unlasting," a long poem devoted to time and experience, and a third section comprised of more public poems, some of them political, such as "The Maquiladoras" and "Poetry and the War." This perceptive, luminescent collection concludes with a group of vivid and conversational poems, recollections, including the gems "Proust" and "HAMLET."

"John Koethe's "The Constructor" is a scrupulous, elegant account of the meditative intellect as an instrument continually registering the passage of time. Exquisitely modulated and brutally honest, these poems would be harrowing were they not so seductively beautiful. No one writing in this country today sees as deeply as Koethe into the tears that lie at the heart of things, and no contemporary investigation of the life of the mind may be called complete that does not accommodate the lush intricacy of his terrifying recognitions."
-- George Bradley

"I prize John Koethe's intimate expanses and unsettling reveries, his tender contemplations and odd mental landscapes. He is an heir to Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery and, like them, he gives us the sensation of thinking itself, of a certain fleeting, daily, solitary consciousness rescued from oblivion and held aloft."
-- Edward Hirsch