Ebook: Poetry in a World of Things: Aesthetics and Empiricism in Renaissance Ekphrasis

We have become used to looking at art from a stance of detachment. In order to be objective, we create a 'mental space' between ourselves and the objects of our investigation, separating internal and external worlds. This detachment dates back to the early modern period, when researchers in a wide variety of fields tried to describe material objects as 'things in themselves' - things, that is, without the admixture of imagination. Generations of scholars have heralded this shift as the Renaissance 'discovery' of the observable world. Here, Rachel Eisendrath explores how poetry responded to this new detachment by becoming a repository for a more complex experience of the world.