SOURCE: "'The Wisdom of Camouflage': Between Rhetoric and Philosophy in Amichai's Poetic System," in Prooftexts, Vol. 10, No. 3, September 1990, pp. 469-91.

In the following essay, Kronfeld argues that, despite the opinion of his detractors to the contrary, Amichai demonstrates in his poetry a clearly defined philosophical and ontological system of thought and belief.

Amichai's system? This playful, "easy" poet has a system? The poet for whom ideas are game pieces and objects in the world are "color blocks you can … rearrange at will, without too much concern for broadening our knowledge"? Ever since the first reviews of Amichai's poetry appeared in the early fifties, the predominant opinion in the critical literature has been, with few exceptions, that Amichai's poetry is not only devoid of any philosophical system but that as a poet, he has no reflective bent at all (hu eyno hogeh mahshavot klal).

This common view is shared...