Repair: A New History

poetry and ethics – Peter McDonald’s Serious Poetry (2002), for instance, or David-Antoine Williams’s Defending Poetry (2010) – are stronger on historical and literary-critical detail, Vincent’s book brings into view the important theoretical background to the consideration of lyric poems as ethical exemplars. Part of the point, however, is that poems, as Vincent recognises, also offer modes of thinking firmly resistant to this kind of analysis. Crucially, ‘Ars’ concludes with a return to the first person singular, an ‘I’ which is not necessarily a ‘we’. At stake in the poem may be an underlying ‘exemplary’ method, a form which reaches outward to a wider public. But there is more than this here too, the moral imagination suddenly capturing what for the poet – and perhaps only for one brief moment – really is so: