SOURCE: “Oppen and Stevens: Reflections on the Lyrical and the Philosophical,” in Sagetrieb, Vol. 12, No. 3, Winter, 1993, pp. 13-32.

In the following analysis of the poetry of Oppen and Wallace Stevens, Heller explores the boundaries between poetry and philosophy.

“If it were not for the Poetic or Prophetic character the Philosophic & Experimental would soon be at the ratio of all things, stand still unable to do other than repeat the same dull round over again.

—Blake

It was on my way toward writing this paper that I encountered two essays in the Spring 1993 issue of the magazine Common Knowledge, one by Gary Morson entitled “Prosaic Bakhtin” and the other, “Toward An Avant-Garde Tractatus: Russell and Wittgenstein on War,” by Marjorie Perloff. I will come to the Perloff essay in a moment, but first, I want to note that, according to Morson, Bakhtin, throughout his long intellectual participation in the...