Poetry of Knowledge and the 'Two Cultures'

John G. Fitch is Professor Emeritus, University of Victoria, Canada. His publications focus on the Roman writer Seneca, and include a two-volume text and translation of Seneca’s dramas in the Loeb Classical Library (revised edition 2018). He farmed sheep and fruit trees on Vancouver Island, and published a book of poems on wildflowers of the British Columbia coast (2013).

• 1. Unity in Knowledge; Eros and the Cosmological Urge.- 2. Unity in Poetry.- 3. The Death of Objectivism; Constructivism and Implication.- 4. Viewpoints in Poetry: Hesiod, Sackville-West, Vergil.- 5. The Fascination of Knowledge. Natural Creativity, Time's Arrow, and Reciprocity.- 6. Knowledge as a Story; Bodily Knowledge, Emotional and Aesthetics Components; Knowledge and Information.- 7. Acquisition of Language and Knowledge. Logicial Positivism and Structural Linguistics.- 8. Metaphor in Cognition, Poetry and Science.- 9. Pleasure as the Heart of Poetry and Science: Lucretius.- 10. Thinking in Poetry: Heidegger on Memorialising and Dis-closure; Vergil and Comprehensiveness.- 11. Dualism and Duel-ism: Kant and the Separation of Poetry from 'Pure' Reason.- 12. The Two Cultures; the Strangeness of Knowledge; the Demand for Originality.- 13. Epilogue: Three Poems of Knowledge.