Volume V (2022)
Ribiero provides an ontology of poetry which describes this transition in “The Spoken and the
Written: An Ontology of Poems,” and which distinguishes declamation-based poetry from its
successor, inscription-based poetry. With this transition, the identity conditions (conditions for
what makes the tradition ontologically distinct) of declamation-based poetry have been frozen in
time, and inscription-based poetry has continued to have identity conditions contrasting that of
its predecessor. What is regarded as mainstream poetry has faithfully followed this shift from
declamation to inscription-based and for which there are ontological implications regarding
what falls into each tradition and which identity conditions should be followed when a form
straddles both traditions. In this paper, I will not cover all the ontological distinctions between
oral and inscription-based poetry, but merely try to describe some important implications in how
we ought to determine their ontological status in modern poetry. This paper will be loosely
divided into three sections. In the first section, I will discuss the ontological status of literature
and how the ontologicalstatus of poetry must be differentiated. In the second section, I will
discuss Ribiero’s proposal for an ontology of poetry, describe the importance of the shift that has
occurred in poetic tradition, and attempt to answer some ontological questions arising from her
proposal. Finally, in the third section,I will discuss some implications of equating modern
poetry with inscription-based poetry.
Section I
There has been an ongoing dialogue between philosophers regarding the ontological
status of literature. A common viewpoint has been corroborated that different types of art should
be regarded as ontologically distinct due to their different identity conditions and entities
accepted in their paradigms. Obviously, physical art has different displayal, preservation, and
evaluative conditions than a play or novel does, and thereby the question of a common
ontological status is ill-formed and too broad to be answerable. Amie Thomasson has written
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