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A Reply to John Hollander

Having just read through John Hollander's brilliant and moving response to my book, my first response in turn is one of gratitude, for the generosity of his taking of my intentions, allowing them room to extend themselves; and of admiration, at the writing of a writer who has original and useful things to say about the relations of poetry and philosophy, of fable and argument, of trope and example, relations at the heart of what my book is about. It is greatly heartening to me that he finds a weight for "poetic" with which my philosophizing may seriously be found poetic (a sense that depends on seeing that in English we have major poetic texts that have to be called philosophical), and that he accepts a certain "novelistic intensity and accuracy" in my exemplifications. Without such perceptions of the fact of my writing, of a reality to its ambitions, it would have no way to achieve the ground of conviction it aspires to. I believe Hollander is right in finding my mode somehow essentially American, and I do not imagine a handsomer compliment than his taking the activities of philosophizing in The Claim of Reason as generally parabolic for the activities of the rest of life itself. I accept the compliment as meaning that the activities of writing in that book project activities of a life that is better than the one I inhabit, that beckons to this one as its better possibility, let me say its better angel. There is nothing in Hollander's essay for me to respond to in the sense of answer. Coming close together with the publication of