The Form of Love - by James Kuzner (Paperback)

About the Book

The Form of Love explores what poetry can articulate about love that philosophy cannot. Reading seven poems, this book shows how figures ranging from Donne to Dickinson use poetic form to transform philosophy's concern to convey truth about love into the concern to create a virtual experience of love.

Book Synopsis

Can poetry articulate something about love that philosophy cannot? The Form of Love argues that it can. In close readings of seven "metaphysical" poems, the book shows how poets of the early modern period and beyond use poetic form to turn philosophy to other ends, in order not to represent the truth about love but to create a virtual experience of love, in all its guises.

The Form of Love shows how verse creates love that can't exist without poetry's specific affordances, and how poems can, in their impossibility, prompt love's radical re-imagining. Like the philosophies on which they draw, metaphysical poems imagine love as an intense form of non-sovereignty, of giving up control. They even imagine love as a liberating bondage--to a friend, a beloved, a saint, a God, or a garden. Yet these poems create strange, striking versions of such love, made in, rather than through, the devices, structures, and forces where love appears.

Tracing how poems think, Kuzner argues, requires an intimate form of reading: close--even too close--attention to and thinking with the text. Showing how poetry thinks of love otherwise than other fields, the book reveals how poetry and philosophy can nevertheless enter into a relation that is itself like love.

From the Back Cover

"The Form of Love is a stunningly original analysis of how 'loving reading' is also a form of thinking. Kuzner performs this thinking as he lovingly reads through lyric poems we thought we knew and--by lingering over odd figures, prosodic strangeness, contradictions, uncertainties, and confessions of incomplete, even failed knowledge--reveals how much we have yet to see. Eschewing masterful pronouncements in favor of surprise, frustration, and pleasure, Kuzner shows us what we can discover if we take both poems and ourselves less seriously."--Melissa E. Sanchez, author of Queer Faith: Reading Promiscuity and Race in the Secular Love Tradition.

"This extraordinary book pursues two questions at the heart of literary study in our time: How can poems tell us anything we don't already know? How can we relate to lives that aren't ours? Kuzner's astonishing readings of metaphysical poems illuminate virtual experiences in which we can participate, but with which we cannot identify."--Michael W. Clune, Case Western Reserve University

Can poetry articulate something about love that philosophy cannot? The Form of Love argues that it can. In close readings of seven "metaphysical" poems, the book shows how these poems turn philosophy to other ends, in order not to represent the truth about love but to create a virtual experience of love, in all its guises.

The Form of Love shows how verse creates love that depends on poetry's specific affordances. Like the philosophies on which they draw, metaphysical poems imagine love as an intense form of non-sovereignty, of giving up control--to a friend, a beloved, a saint, a God, or a garden. Yet these poems create strange, striking versions of such love, made in, rather than through, the devices, structures, and forces where love appears.

Tracing how poems think, Kuzner argues, requires an intimate form of reading: close--even too close--attention to and thinking with the text. Showing how poetry thinks of love otherwise than other fields, the book reveals how poetry and philosophy can nevertheless enter into a relation that is itself like love.

James Kuzner is Associate Professor of English at Brown University.

Review Quotes

The Form of Love is a stunningly original analysis of how 'loving reading' is also a form of thinking. Kuzner performs this thinking as he lovingly reads through lyric poems we thought we knew and--by lingering over odd figures, prosodic strangeness, contradictions, uncertainties, and confessions of incomplete, even failed knowledge--reveals how much we have yet to see. Eschewing masterful pronouncements in favor of surprise, frustration, and pleasure, Kuzner shows us what we can discover if we take both poems and ourselves less seriously.---Melissa E. Sanchez, author of Queer Faith: Reading Promiscuity and Race in the Secular Love Tradition

This extraordinary book pursues two questions at the heart of literary study in our time: How can poems tell us anything we don't already know? How can we relate to lives that aren't ours? Kuzner's astonishing readings of metaphysical poems illuminate virtual experiences in which we can participate, but with which we cannot identify.---Michael W. Clune, Case Western Reserve University

About the Author

James Kuzner is Associate Professor of English at Brown University. He is the author of Shakespeare as a Way of Life and Open Subjects.