Knee Deep in Modern Poetry

What Are Poets For?, a new collection of essays on poetry and poetics by critic/philosopher Gerald L. Bruns, is rather cryptically subtitled “an anthropology of contemporary poetry and poetics.” An anthropology? In a short preface, Bruns justifies this apparent moment of disciplinary misidentification: “For if there is no one thing that can be called poetry — if it is made of anomalies . . . then one’s study must proceed, like an anthropologist’s progress through an alien culture, at ground level, from one local practice or artifact to another, without subsuming things into a system.” Despite Bruns’ wealth of knowledge in philosophy and aesthetics — his engagements with Levinas and Adorno are particularly rich — the book largely adheres to this opening promise to keep its nose close to the ground, sniffing out localized allusions, formal patterns, and rhetorical maneuvers in the poems that it reads rather than constructing any sort of durable intellectual edifice.