Helen Vendler. Poets Thinking: Pope, Whitman, Dickenson, Yeats. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2006. $19.95 cloth; $14.95 paper What is thinking? To make the question thus explicit is to be at once beguiled by the charms and beset by the longeurs of Western European epistemology. Is all thinking rational? Is all rationality, as its etymology suggests, a kind of calculation? Does thinking exclude emotion? Is remembering a kind of thinking? Is perception? Neither the dictionaries nor the latest issues of New Scientist are much help, for to answer any one of these questions decisively is not so much to uncover the fact of the matter as to take a stand in the charged debate about what it means to be human. And to evade answering decisively is not so much to acknowledge ignorance as to acquiesce in the (often unvoiced) intellectual politics that happen to be in vogue at the moment of one's evasion.
