Historical poetics and the problem of exemplarity

This special issue began with a conversation between the editors about individual poems. What do we do with the experiences of poems, we wondered, when those experiences are not readily assimilated by the purposive structures of academic criticism? One reads many poems and one forgets most of them, but, if one is a professional critic, a certain critico‐theoretical processor buzzes in the background, picking out moments of poetic significance, even if these are not at first consciously grasped. Certain moments are stored, are returned to, are interpreted, are framed or contextualised, and are brought forward as examples for critical discourse. One answer to the question of what is to be done with the rest of the poems is, precisely, nothing. Yet this belies all the things that happen when reading these poems, some of which might even get that processor going. It may be that these experiences, and these poems, are constitutively absent from criticism. And yet, for this very reason, these experiences might illuminate the particular modes of purposiveness that become our second nature as professional critics. Could it even be that critical arguments that make use of poems tend to strip them of something ontologically essential? That, phenomenologically speaking, there is no such thing as an individual poem for critics, but only critical exemplars?