Thanks for your comments. I wrestled with this essay because I felt, as you did, that to even utter or mutter the word “poetry” with the more staid and ostensibly yawn-inducing “ethics” was to risk reducing one of the greatest art forms in the world, ever, to some dusty obscure and pedantic exercise in moral philosophy.

I guess ultimately I agree with you, that “poetry admits ethical criticism…in the same way that every human action does, not in a different way.” I would only add that, because something takes place between two people (writer and reader), that something has an ethical dimension, just as it has a very vital and very important aesthetic dimension. We talk about the aesthetic dimension a lot in essays about poetry – talk about form, style, content, vision – but what does it mean to talk about that ethical dimension? That’s I guess what I was wondering about when I wrote the essay, How we talk about ethics without reducing poetry to non-poetry. Nussbaum, for me, is good on this topic – she talks about the relationship between style, say, and ethical content, and she uses Plato and his dialogues as a fascinating example.

As far as surreal poems not lending themselves to questions about ethics, I want to agree with you, but I do disagree. Simply because reading such a poem involves two people, even the most decadent symbolist art for art’s sake poetry can lend itself to ethical criticism (thought hopefully a robust, as opposed to anemic, one). That would probably make an interesting essay, now that I think about it! :)

At any rate, thank you again for writing and sharing your thoughts and poetry. I wish you all the best,

Andrew

In my blog, I published a poem the function of which is not to convey any ethical message, a poem just for the sake of the mere images – certainly not “neutral starting points for thought,” but neutral inasmuch as it neutralises, in some ways, the reader’s expectation to know better how to behave once she has read it…

http://greg-ory.blogspot.co.uk