Charles Altieri's book sets modernist American poetry in a precise cultural context by analysing how major poets reacted to the challenge posed by modernist painting's radical critique of traditional representational models for art.
In this significant contribution to aesthetic philosophy from one of the foremost writers on American poetry, Charles Altieri champions the neglected, non-cognitive, aspects of our encounters with works of art.
Charles Altieri argues for a reconsideration of the Kantian tradition of Idealist ethics, which he believes can restore much of the power of the arguments for the role of aesthetics in art.
Altieri focuses his attention on the poetry of Wallace Stevens, arguing that critics have failed to appreciate the degree to which modernist poetry, like modernist art, breaks from the epistemology that arose from cultures of empiricism.