This book revives a contested moment in the history of aesthetic theory when Romantic-period writers exploit the growing awareness of irresolutions in Kant’s third Kritik, especially in his critique of judgements of the sublime. Read with hindsight, these openings can be seen to have generated literary opportunities for writings that explicitly embraced the philosophical significance delegated to the aesthetic by Kant, but then took advantage of the licence he had conceded. Romantic writing claimed a wider significance of its own that philosophy now had to learn to rationalise. Consequent aesthetic reorientations, in which splendours and miseries become interchangeable, reflect political instabilities already exploited by feminist and nationalist writing. Falling becomes a kind of rising, and literature’s unregulated power of metamorphosis persuasively challenges hierarchies of all kinds, including its own.

Chapter 4 focuses on Stevens’ conception of autonomy with the purpose of reassessing his poetry’s relation to philosophy. Stevens not only thematizes this relation in his poetry, but also identifies the processes that decouple the reflective operations of poetic thinking from that of philosophy. The chapter explores this aspect of Stevens’ work from the 1930s and 1940s in dialogue with Badiou’s “inaesthetics,” which allows for a consideration of poetry as a site for thinking without the support or guidance of philosophical discourse. The notion of inaesthetics becomes the enabling occasion for a focus on the divergences, rather than the affinities, between Stevens and philosophy, and for a move to a historically contextualized understanding of his poetry’s resistance to the philosophical school of logical positivism. Stevens’ skepticism toward logical positivism must be added to the historical factors behind his increased emphasis on poetic autonomy from philosophy in his writing of this period.