The Practical Muse: Pragmatist Poetics in Hulme, Pound, and Stevens

This book invites students of modernism to leave the new pragmatism, modeled by Richard Rorty on Nietzschean fictionalism, for the old pragmatism championed by William James. Unlike Rorty, James is hopeful that the pragmatist's truths may coincide with the reality. This book argues that Jamesian optimism is central to their poetics.