In the classical period, we find people writing poetry about scientific and philosophical problems and in the eighteenth century, there were many poems about landscape, natural science, e.g., Erasmus Darwin on the generation of plants, but in the nineteenth century, poetry ceased to be written about natural history or crafts or philosophy. What happened?
The 19th century was a period of empire building during which material wealth takes precedence over abstract ideals, glorification of landscape found among the Romantics yielding to exploitation of it. A philosophical poem is one which carries an abstract idea to sublime heights.
You shouldn't overlook the transcendentalists who were active for over half of the 19th century. I think one problem was that in the late 19th C. the concerns of philosophy became much more scientifically and politically oriented, which didn't sit well with lyric approaches.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/transcendentalism/
https://www.poetrysoup.com/poems/philosophy
Philosophical poetry is still flourishing and some of it is more directly or selfconsciously philosophical than it has ever been:
- https://www.poetrysoup.com/poems/philosophy
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Zwicky
- https://www.brickbooks.ca/reviews/rapprochement-the-poetry-of-jan-zwicky/
- http://samrickless.com/limericks.html
- http://consc.net/philosophical-humor/ [scroll down to "Songs and Poems"]
- http://www.metrolyrics.com/the-philosophers-song-lyrics-monty-python.html
- http://www.limerickpoemsandpoets.com/poems/philosophy_limerick_poems
One of the greatest philosophical poems in the Western tradition is Milton's Paradise Lost.George Herbert and Hopkins dwelt on the anxieties of existence.In the Indian tradition the greatest philosophical poem is the Bhagavad Gita that elucidates the dilemmas of existence.Many Indian Bhakti poets like Kabir have written some of the best philosophical poems. The philosophical poem is timeless.
Much here depends of what we mean by "philosophical." It's noteworthy that philosophy and science were integrated disciplines until the twentieth century, at which time philosophy was marginalized as a discipline (as science now is by engineering and entertainment). I would argue that the Romantic poets (and Milton, much earlier) were among the keenest in exploring philosophical ideas in their poems. Several (including Mary Shelley in Frankenstein) were obsessed with the Faust and Prometheus myths, both of which directly address problems of human "knowledge." Wordsworth was concerned about epistemological issues--the subjective responses to nature, the object-subject relationship. Blake was profoundly philosophical, providing poetic expression to metaphysical, ethical, and political issues. The deliberate disconnect between philosophy ("statement") and poetry comes with modernism in early twentieth century poetry. Then the "object" per se becomes the valid subject of poetry--e.g. the red wheelbarrow and white chicken, the cold plums in the refrigerator--in that the new modernism wants to draw readers away from abstraction and "statement" to imagery, metaphor and "direct experience" (through words, of course).
George Santayana's Three Philosophical Poets deals with Lucretius, Dante and Goethe. That choice of poets gives a pretty clear indication of the historical range and types of poems we can (and should) call philosophical. The many poets mentioned in the previous answers, Milton, Blake, and the wondrous Bhagavad Gita, expand this definition as well. All of them have a strong didactic element, and it appears in most periods, most straightforwardly in Alexander Pope's Essay on Man. Theology, both doctrine and feeling, and philosophy get linked in poetry.
Every poem is philosophical: Philosophy means love of knowledge. Poet in Sanskrit is kavi, which also means knowing.
"Philosophy" as a term is used by both those who value intuitive modes of knowing and those who value discursive and rationalistic approaches. In the Western tradition I find it useful to call a poem "philosophical" if it finds expression in a poetic mode (from stanzas to free verse) while having a discursive-rational "argument" presented in it. I hope this is helpful as a way of "naming" types of poems, in a time when, frankly, some poetic forms seem so formless I often don't know what a poem is any more.
Poem is an efficient knowledge-storing device; and people reciting, and listening to, poems are efficient knowledge-transmitting devices. And what is the best knowledge? The knowledge of everything. That's why original (not to be confused with novel) art points to the origin (of everything). Modern art, including modern poetry, not constrained by the necessity to store and transmit knowledge, points nowhere, but there is enough hard-disk space to store the nonsense. The dominant modern poetry form is 'Enter' and it's done like this: write prose and hit the Enter key now and then (the more often the better). And so the entire Internet is flooded with 'poems' containing
one
word
per
line.
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Econ
- Innovation Economics
- Innovation