Volume V (2022)
the ontological status of literature in general, particularly regarding poetry.
Finally, now that I identified some notable attempts to establish an ontology of literature,
we can explore why there ought to be an ontological distinction between literature and poetry.
As Karen Simecek says in “New Directions for the Philosophy of Poetry,” “Practices are at the
core of the ontological status of poetry in the way that they are not of literature because poetry
is? inherently less fixed than? other types of literature.” 11 As previously discussed, oral poetry
falls through Wollheim’s type/token distinction at points because poetry has historically been a
fluid genre, consisting of varying degrees of emphasis on performance and ownership over time.
Practices in poetry have evolved, leading to a shift in ontological status. Though poetry has
different identity conditions depending on its tradition (declamation versus inscription) just as
literature does, what distinguishes poetry ontologically is that the identity conditions regarding
each form have changed as declamation-based poetry has been replaced by inscription-based
poetry. While both (technically) exist concurrently, what is regarded as mainstream poetry has
faithfully followed this transition and mainstream poetry is now regarded as synonymous with
inscription-based poetry. No such transition exists in literature, and with this transition comes a
variety of identity conditions that, applied to literature, would seem like a category mistake. A
poem can be linguistically fluid or linguistically rigid — as declamation-based poetry has tended
towards the former and inscription-based poetry has tended towards that latter. This iis not an
important distinction for literature outside questions of the integrity of a translation. However,
when we begin to delve deeper linguistically and consider whether words must maintain the
same order to be the same work of poetry, there seems to be no similarly applicable identity
condition which we can also attribute to the ontology of literature.
11 Karen Simecek,"New Directions for the Philosophy of Poetry," Philosophy Compass 14, no. 6 (2019), 8.
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