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A Defense of Poetry: Reflections on the Occasion of Writing by Paul H. Fry. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995. Pp. 255. $45.00, cloth; $16.95, paper.
As Paul Fry's title shows, a point of departure for his intricate and welcome reflections on "writing" is Shelley's famous essay, A Defence of Poetry. Fry rightly praises this essay as "the strongest defense of poetry ever written," seeing it as pioneering a genre, the "'critique of Enlightenment"' (3), to which his own volume seeks to belong. But he finds fault with Shelley's essay on two counts: it conceives of poetry "not as a suspension of truth-claims but as a renewal of them" (3) and its broad definition of poetry raises the question "poetry as opposed to what?" (4). Fry sees the purpose of his book as an attempt to find answers to these perceived weaknesses in Shelley's essay; he asserts: "I claim that poetry (literature, expressive communication), unlike other forms of discourse that exhaust themselves shaping or making sense of things, is that characteristic of utterance, defined as "ostension" in the ensuing chapters, which temporarily releases consciousness from its dependence on the signifying process" (4). Fry wants poetry to be negatively capable with regard to "truth," to suspend our irritable reaching after certainty. Indeed, one of his most intriguing chapters is his "Conclusion," entitled "The Ethics of Suspending Knowledge," in which he argues that "the suspension of knowledge enabled by ostension can serve to reinvigorate the very quest it interrupts" (201) and relates his position to, or rather insinuates its affinity with, Blanchot's hostility to "knowledge" in "Literature an the Right to Death" (though, for Fry, Blanchot "aestheticizes the moment more than I wish to do" [209]). Lyotard's attempt to "think the nonhuman" (206) is also enlisted by Fry in his praise of ostension. But Fry does more here than drop names with gusto; he makes one realize the significance of a number of seemingly anti-humanist remarks made by the thinkers whose work he describes. More than this, he establishes, with a quietly unintimidated poise, a sense of his own nuanced reservations about the ideas of these thinkers; he remains, throughout, independent and stimulating, nowhere more so than in the final paragraph where he...