Wallace Stevens is widely regarded as an author whose poetry possesses a particularly close affinity to philosophy, which is usually taken to mean that his poems contain statements of philosophical concepts or propositions. In contrast to this, the following article examines the relation of Stevens’s poetry and philosophy with respect not to the contents of his poems but to their sequential structure. This analytic focus is motivated by the observation that the progression of the utterance in a great many of Stevens’s poems appears to be modelled on the principles of philosophical argumentation: i.e., that the poems go through a quasi-philosophical process of questioning, reflection, and cognition. As lyric poems, however, they pursue this practical process of thinking and arguing on the basis of the principles of poetic composition. The poems can thus be described as employing two different discourse types at the same time and in interaction with each other: philosophical argumentation, on the one hand, and poetic composition on the other. Accordingly, the following analyses are guided by two questions: first, what aims do the argumentations in the poems pursue and, second, how do the two discourse types interact with each other in that process? Three poems from different periods of Stevens’s poetic œuvre are used as examples: “A High-Toned Old Christian Woman” (1923), “Man Carrying Thing” (1947) and “The Plain Sense of Things” (1954).

There are astonishingly numerous and profound influences of the Pre-Socratics – especially Herakleitos and Zenon – on Russian literature between realism and the avant-garde of the 1920s. The focus here is on the concepts of Herakleitos’ “panta rhei” and his pre-dialectical thinking in polarities. From there, a bridge can be built to Leo Tolstoy’s narrative technique of the “stream of consciousness” and his speculations on time and history in the context of his novel “War and Peace.” The Russian novelist was particularly fascinated by Zenon’s time paradox (Achilles and the Tortoise). Furthermore, this contribution is concerned with Herakleitos’ model of circulations and dualities in the mytho-poetics of Russian Symbolism around 1900 (Viacheslav Ivanov, Andrey Bely, Konstantin Balmont) and, above all, with Russian poetry of the absurd (Daniil Kharms, Aleksander Vvedenskii) and the concepts of nothingness, of infinity in the context on this side of the categories of space and time (“cisfinite poetry”), and with the spirit of the time paradox of Zenon.

In this paper, I examine Gottlob Frege’s attempt in “On Sense and Reference” to determine semantically what poetry is. Therefore, Frege’s assumptions as well as strategies concerning the distinction between poetic and non-poetic discourse are analyzed in order to show in which way a theory of “poetic meaning” is possible. Frege’s rather inconspicuous explanation of poetry, although itself quite unsatisfactory in the end, allows us to strengthen the hope for a ‘minimal’ semantic theory of poetry that depends on a certain idea of fictionality.

Earliest Greek philosophy concurred with traditional poetry in its attempt to deliver cosmological thought about the Universe (τὰ πάντα); to this end, it used a paratactically descriptive prose style (Anaximander, Anaximenes). Adopted by a new kind of poetry criticizing the traditional myths as mere opinions (δόξαι) and mediated through its Pythagorean mathematization, philosophy gathers itself into its own critical principle: Identity (Xenophanes). Identity and Difference together (Heraclitus) differentiate the world-immanent Logos (λόγος ἐών). In human thought, this Logos presents itself as Judgement (κρίσις): Predication is reflected in a tropic prose style. The disentanglement of the resulting paradoxical unity of opposites calls forth the Principle of Contradiction and reinstates poetry as self-revelation of intellectual intuition (νοεῖν): while in the opinions of mortals, everything might be considered as merely asserted and ambiguous, contradiction is the ever-present presupposition in every act of thinking (Parmenides). The infinite progress of excluding contradiction (Anaxagoras) is itself dialectically shown as contradictory (Zenon): What remains is the perception of the sole, non-conceptualized phenomenon, whose apprehension existentially deepens into faith (πίστις). Linking up with pre-philosophical myth (Hesiod), it manifests itself once again as poetry, now already rhetorically (Empedocles).

With Hölderlin’s conversion to philosophy, he began to take an interest in the problem of how to address philosophers and non-philosophers in one and the same literary work. He developed a doctrine that would enable him to transform the desire for eternal things in accordance with his political and educational ambitions. His understanding of exoteric teaching guided his reading of Plato, Kant, Hemsterhuis, and Fichte. It shaped both his correspondence and the composition of his novel, “Hyperion”.